Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Work insights platform Fin raised $20 million in Series A funding and brought in Evan Cummack, a former Twilio executive, as its new chief executive officer.

The San Francisco-based company captures employee workflow data from across applications and turns it into productivity insights to improve the way enterprise teams work and remain engaged.

Fin was founded in 2015 by Andrew Kortina, co-founder of Venmo, and Facebook’s former VP of product and Slow Ventures partner Sam Lessin. Initially, the company was doing voice assistant technology — think Alexa but powered by humans and machine learning — and then workplace analytics software in 2020. You can read more about Fin’s origins at the link below.

The new round was led by Coatue, with participation from First Round Capital, Accel and Kleiner Perkins. The original team was talented, but small, so the new funding will build out sales, marketing and engineering teams, Cummack said.

“At that point, the right thing was to raise money, so at the end of last year, the company raised a $20 million Series A, and it was also decided to find a leadership team that knows how to build an enterprise,” Cummack told TechCrunch. “The company had completely pivoted and removed ‘Analytics’ from our name because it was not encompassing what we do.”

Fin’s software measures productivity and provides insights on ways managers can optimize processes, coach their employees and see how teams are actually using technology to get their work done. At the same time, employees are able to manage their workflow and highlight areas where there may be bottlenecks. All combined, it leads to better operations and customer experiences, Cummack said.

Graphic showing how work is really done. Image Credits: Fin

Fin’s view is that as more automation occurs, the company is looking at a “renaissance of human work.” There will be more jobs and more types of jobs, but people will be able to do them more effectively and the work will be more fulfilling, he added.

Particularly with the use of technology, he notes that in the era before cloud computing, there was a small number of software vendors. Now with the average tech company using over 130 SaaS apps, it allows for a lot of entrepreneurs and adoption of best-in-breed apps so that a viable company can start with a handful of people and leverage those apps to gain big customers.

“It’s different for enterprise customers, though, to understand that investment and what they are spending their money on as they use tools to get their jobs done,” Cummack added. “There is massive pressure to improve the customer experience and move quickly. Now with many people working from home, Fin enables you to look at all 130 apps as if they are one and how they are being used.”

As a result, Fin’s customers are seeing metrics like 16% increase in team utilization and engagement, a 25% decrease in support ticket handle time and a 71% increase in policy compliance. Meanwhile, the company itself is doubling and tripling its customers and revenue each year.

Now with leadership and people in place, Cummack said the company is positioned to scale, though it already had a huge head start in terms of a meaningful business.

Arielle Zuckerberg, partner at Coatue, said via email that she was part of a previous firm that invested in Fin’s seed round to build a virtual assistant. She was also a customer of Fin Assistant until it was discontinued.

When she heard the company was pivoting to enterprise, she “was excited because I thought it was a natural outgrowth of the previous business, had a lot of potential and I was already familiar with management and thought highly of them.”

She believed the “brains” of the company always revolved around understanding and measuring what assistants were doing to complete a task as a way to create opportunities for improvement or automation. The pivot to agent-facing tools made sense to Zuckerberg, but it wasn’t until the global pandemic that it clicked.

“Service teams were forced to go remote overnight, and companies had little to no visibility into what people were doing working from home,” she added. “In this remote environment, we thought that Fin’s product was incredibly well-suited to address the challenges of managing a growing remote support team, and that over time, their unique data set of how people use various apps and tools to complete tasks can help business leaders improve the future of work for their team members. We believe that contact center agents going remote was inevitable even before COVID, but COVID was a huge accelerant and created a compelling ‘why now’ moment for Fin’s solution.”

Going forward, Coatue sees Fin as “a process mining company that is focused on service teams.” By initially focusing on customer support and contact center use case — a business large enough to support a scaled, standalone business — rather than joining competitors in going after Fortune 500 companies where implementation cycles are long and there is slow time-to-value, Zuckerberg said Fin is better able to “address the unique challenges of managing a growing remote support team with a near-immediate time-to-value.”

Reliance on a single technology as a lifeline is a futile battle now. When simple automation no longer does the trick, delivering end-to-end automation needs a combination of complementary technologies that can give a facelift to business processes: the digital operations toolbox.

According to a McKinsey survey, enterprises that have likely been successful with digital transformation efforts adopted sophisticated technologies such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things or machine learning. Enterprises can achieve hyperautomation with the digital ops toolbox, the hub for your digital operations.

The toolbox is a synchronous medley of intelligent business process management (iBPM), robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, low code, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and a rules engine. The technologies can be optimally combined to achieve the organization’s key performance indicator (KPI) through hyperautomation.

The hyperautomation market is burgeoning: Analysts predict that by 2025, it will reach around $860 billion. Let’s see why.

The purpose of a digital ops toolbox

The toolbox, the treasure chest of technologies it is, helps with three crucial aspects: process automation, orchestration and intelligence.

Process automation: A hyperautomation mindset introduces the world of “automating anything that can be,” whether that’s a process or a task. If something can be handled by bots or other technologies, it should be.

Orchestration: Hyperautomation, per se, adds an orchestration layer to simple automation. Technologies like intelligent business process management orchestrate the entire process.

Intelligence: Machines can automate repetitive tasks, but they lack the decision-making capabilities of humans. And, to achieve a perfect harmony where machines are made to “think and act,” or attain cognitive skills, we need AI. Combining AI, ML and natural language processing algorithms with analytics propels simple automation to become more cognitive. Instead of just following if-then rules, the technologies help gather insights from the data. The decision-making capabilities enable bots to make decisions.

Simple automation versus hyperautomation

Here’s a story of evolving from simple automation to hyperautomation with an example: an order-to-cash process.

Understanding what you will change is most important to achieve a long-lasting and successful robotic process automation transformation. There are three pillars that will be most impacted by the change: people, process and digital workers (also referred to as robots). The interaction of these three pillars executes workflows and tasks, and if integrated cohesively, determines the success of an enterprisewide digital transformation.

Robots are not coming to replace us, they are coming to take over the repetitive, mundane and monotonous tasks that we’ve never been fond of. They are here to transform the work we do by allowing us to focus on innovation and impactful work. RPA ties decisions and actions together. It is the skeletal structure of a digital process that carries information from point A to point B. However, the decision-making capability to understand and decide what comes next will be fueled by RPA’s integration with AI.

We are seeing software vendors adopt vertical technology capabilities and offer a wide range of capabilities to address the three pillars mentioned above. These include powerhouses like UiPath, which recently went public, Microsoft’s Softomotive acquisition, and Celonis, which recently became a unicorn with a $1 billion Series D round. RPA firms call it “intelligent automation,” whereas Celonis targets the execution management system. Both are aiming to be a one-stop shop for all things related to process.

We have seen investments in various product categories for each stage in the intelligent automation journey. Process and task mining for process discovery, centralized business process repositories for CoEs, executives to manage the pipeline and measure cost versus benefit, and artificial intelligence solutions for intelligent document processing.

For your transformation journey to be successful, you need to develop a deep understanding of your goals, people and the process.

Define goals and measurements of success

From a strategic standpoint, success measures for automating, optimizing and redesigning work should not be solely centered around metrics like decreasing fully loaded costs or FTE reduction, but should put the people at the center. To measure improved customer and employee experiences, give special attention to metrics like decreases in throughput time or rework rate, identify vendors that deliver late, and find missed invoice payments or determine loan requests from individuals that are more likely to be paid back late. These provide more targeted success measures for specific business units.

The returns realized with an automation program are not limited to metrics like time or cost savings. The overall performance of an automation program can be more thoroughly measured with the sum of successes of the improved CX/EX metrics in different business units. For each business process you will be redesigning, optimizing or automating, set a definitive problem statement and try to find the right solution to solve it. Do not try to fit predetermined solutions into the problems. Start with the problem and goal first.

Understand the people first

To accomplish enterprise digital transformation via RPA, executives should put people at the heart of their program. Understanding the skill sets and talents of the workforce within the company can yield better knowledge of how well each employee can contribute to the automation economy within the organization. A workforce that is continuously retrained and upskilled learns how to automate and flexibly complete tasks together with robots and is better equipped to achieve transformation at scale.

Celonis, the late-stage process mining software startup, announced a $1 billion Series D investment this morning on an eye-popping $11 billion valuation, up from $2.5 billion in its Series C in 2019, quadrupling its value in just two years.

Durable Capital Partners LP and T. Rowe Price Associates co-led the round, with participation from new investors Franklin Templeton, Splunk Ventures and existing investors Arena Holdings. Other unnamed existing investors also participated.

While it was at it, the company announced it was naming experienced financial pro Carlos Kirjner as CFO. Kirjner’s most recent job was at Google, where he led finance for ads and other key product areas, according to the company.

The presence of institutional investors like T. Rowe Price and Franklin Templeton and the huge influx of capital could be a signal that this is the last private fundraise for the company before it goes public, and Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke did not shy away from IPO talk when asked about it.

“It could be, yeah. It’s kind of tough to predict the future, but look, we’re very bullish about the growth and our prospects both as a private — and down the road — a public company, and obviously we now have backers that can invest capital in both [public and private markets],” Rinke told TechCrunch.

Rinke says what’s driving this interest is the tremendous potential of the market even beyond process mining, which he sees as just a starting point for a much larger market. “Process mining where we originated from is really just the gateway to build new processes and better processes for organizations, and as you think about that that’s a much much bigger market that we’re addressing,” he said.

The company’s processing mining software sits at the beginning of the process automation food chain, which includes robotic process automation, no-code workflow and other tools to bring more automated workflows to companies. It’s quite possible that the company could develop other pieces of this or use the new capital to buy talent and functionality, something that Rinke acknowledges is possible now with this much capital behind the company.

Celonis started by mapping out exactly how work flows through an organization, something that used to take high-priced human consultants months to figure out sitting with employees and watching how work flows. Once a company knows how work moves through an organization, it’s easier to find inefficiencies and places that are ripe for using automation tools. Speeding up that first part of the operation with technology can bring down the cost and accelerate innovation and change.

The company made a huge deal with IBM recently where IBM plans on training 10,000 consultants worldwide to use Celonis tooling. That brings the power of a company the size of IBM to one that is still relatively small in comparison — Rinke thinks they’ll reach 2,000 employees by year end — and that could be at least part of the reason investors were willing to pump so much capital into the company.

The company, which recently turned 10, currently has 1,000 enterprise customers, including Uber, Dell, Splunk (which is also an investor), L’Oréal and AstraZeneca.

Automation has become a big theme in enterprise IT, with organizations using RPA, no-code and low-code tools, and other technology to speed up work and bring more insights and analytics into how they do things every day, and today IBM is announcing an acquisition as it hopes to take on a bigger role in providing those automation services. The IT giant has acquired myInvenio, an Italian startup that builds and operates process mining software.

Process mining is the part of the automation stack that tracks data produced by a company’s software, as well as how the software works, in order to provide guidance on what a company could and should do to improve it. In the case of myInvenio, the company’s approach involves making a “digital twin” of an organization to help track and optimize processes. IBM is interested in how myInvenio’s tools are able to monitor data in areas like sales, procurement, production and accounting to help organizations identify what might be better served with more automation, which it can in turn run using RPA or other tools as needed.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. It is not clear if myInvenio had any outside investors (we’ve asked and are awaiting a response). This is the second acquisition IBM has made out of Italy. (The first was in 2014, a company called CrossIdeas that now forms part of the company’s security business.)

IBM and myInvenio are not exactly strangers: The two inked a deal as recently as November 2020 to integrate the Italian startup’s technology into IBM’s bigger automation services business globally.

Dinesh Nirmal, GM of IBM Automation, said in an interview that the reason IBM acquired the company was two-fold. First, it lets IBM integrate the technology more closely into the company’s Cloud Pak for Business Automation, which sits on and is powered by Red Hat OpenShift and has other automation capabilities already embedded within it, specifically robotic process automation (RPA), document processing, workflows and decisions.

Second and perhaps more importantly, it will mean that IBM will not have to tussle for priority for its customers in competition with other solution partners that myInvenio already had. IBM will be the sole provider.

“Partnerships are great but in a partnership you also have the option to partner with others, and when it comes to priority, who decides?” he said. “From the customer perspective, will they work just on our deal, or others first? Now, our customers will get the end result of this… We can bring a single solution to an end user or an enterprise, saying, ‘look you have document processing, RPA, workflow, mining.’ That is the beauty of this and what customers will see.”

He said that IBM currently serves with its automation products customers across a range of verticals, including financial, insurance, healthcare and manufacturing.

Notably, this is not the first acquisition that IBM has made to build out this stack. Last year, it acquired WDG to expand into robotic process automation.

And interestingly, it’s not even the only partnership that IBM has had in process mining. Just earlier this month, it announced a deal with one of the bigger names in the field, Celonis, a German startup valued at $2.5 billion in 2019.

Ironically, at the time, my colleague Ron wondered aloud why IBM wasn’t just buying Celonis outright in that deal. It’s hard to speculate if price was one reason. Remember: We don’t know the terms of this acquisition, but given myInvenio was off the fundraising radar, chances are it’s possibly a little less than Celonis’s price tag.

We’ve asked and IBM has confirmed that it will continue to work with Celonis alongside now offering its own native process mining tools.

“In keeping with IBM’s open approach and $1 billion investment in ecosystem, [Global Business Services, IBM’s enterprise services division] works with a broad range of technologies based on client and market demand, including IBM AI and Automation software,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Celonis focuses on execution management which supports GBS’ transformation of clients’ business processes through intelligent workflows across industries and domains. Specifically, Celonis has deep connectivity into enterprise systems such as Salesforce, SAP, Workday or ServiceNow, so the Celonis EMS platform helps GBS accelerate clients’ transformations and BPO engagements with these ERP platforms.”

Indeed, at the end of the day, companies that offer services, especially suites of services, are working in environments where they have to be open to customers using their own technology, or bringing in something else.

There may have been another force pushing IBM to bring more of this technology in-house, and that’s wider competitive climate. Earlier this year, SAP acquired another European startup in the process mining space, Signavio, in a deal reportedly worth about $1.2 billion. As more of these companies get snapped up by would-be IBM rivals, and those left standing are working with a plethora of other parties, maybe it was high time for IBM to make sure it had its own horse in the race.

“Through IBM’s planned acquisition of myInvenio, we are revolutionizing the way companies manage their process operations,” said Massimiliano Delsante, CEO, myInvenio, who will be staying on with the deal. “myInvenio’s unique capability to automatically analyze processes and create simulations — what we call a ‘Digital Twin of an Organization’ — is joining with IBM’s AI-powered automation capabilities to better manage process execution. Together we will offer a comprehensive solution for digital process transformation and automation to help enterprises continuously transform insights into action.”

Before you can improve a workflow, you have to understand how work advances through a business, which is more complex than you might imagine inside a large enterprise. That’s where Celonis comes in. It uses software to identify how work moves through an organization and suggests more efficient ways of getting the same work done, also known as process mining.

Today, the company announced a significant partnership with IBM where IBM Global Services will train 10,000 consultants worldwide on Celonis. The deal gives Celonis, a company with around 1,200 employees, access to the massive selling and consulting unit, while IBM gets a deep understanding of a piece of technology that is at the front end of the workflow automation trend.

Miguel Milano, chief revenue officer at Celonis, says that digitizing processes has been a trend for several years. It has sped up due to COVID, and it’s partly why the two companies have decided to work together. “Intelligent workflows, or more broadly spoken workflows built to help companies execute better, are at the heart of this partnership and it’s at the heart of this trend now in the market,” Milano said.

The other part of this is that IBM now owns Red Hat, which it acquired in 2018 for $34 billion. The two companies believe that by combining the Celonis technology, which is cloud based, with Red Hat, which can span the hybrid world of on premises and cloud, the two together can provide a much more powerful solution to follow work wherever it happens.

“I do think that moving the [Celonis] software into the Red Hat OpenShift environment is hugely powerful because it does allow in what’s already a very powerful open solution to now operate across this hybrid cloud world, leveraging the power of OpenShift which can straddle the worlds of mainframe, private cloud and public cloud. And data straddle those worlds, and will continue to straddle those worlds,” Mark Foster, senior vice president at IBM Services explained.

You might think that IBM, which acquired robotic process automation vendor WDG Automation last summer, would simply attempt to buy Celonis, but Foster says the partnership is consistent with the company’s attempt to partner with a broader ecosystem.

“I think that this is very much part of an overarching focus of IBM with key ecosystem partners. Some of them are going to be bigger, some of them are going to be smaller, and […] I think this is one where we see the opportunity to connect with an organization that’s taking a leading position in its category, and the opportunity for that to take advantage of the IBM Red Hat technologies…” he said.

The companies had already been working together for some time prior to this formal announcement, and this partnership is the culmination of that. As this firmer commitment to one another goes into effect, the two companies will be working more closely to train thousands of IBM consultants on the technology, while moving the Celonis solution into Red Hat OpenShift in the coming months.

It’s clearly a big deal with the feel of an acquisition, but Milano says that this is about executing his company’s strategy to work with more systems integrators (SIs), and while IBM is a significant partner, it’s not the only one.

“We are becoming an SI consulting-driven organization. So we put consulting companies like IBM at the forefront of our strategy, and this [deal] is a big cornerstone of our strategy,” he said.

Power Automate is Microsoft’s platform for streamlining repetitive workflows — you may remember it under its original name: Microsoft Flow. The market for these robotic process automation (RPA) tools is hot right now, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft, too, is doubling down on its platform. Only a few months ago, the team launched Power Automate Desktop, based on its acquisition of Softomotive, which helps users automate workflows in legacy desktop-based applications, for example. After a short time in preview, Power Automate Desktop is now generally available.

The real news today, though, is that the team is also launching a new tool, the Process Advisor, which is now in preview as part of the Power Automate platform. This new process mining tool provides users with a new collaborative environment where developers and business users can work together to create new automations.

The idea here is that business users are the ones who know exactly how a certain process works. With Process Advisor, they can now submit recordings of how they process a refund, for example, and then submit that to the developers, who are typically not experts in how these processes usually work.

What’s maybe just as important is that a system like this can identify bottlenecks in existing processes where automation can help speed up existing workflows.

Image Credits: Microsoft

“This goes back to one of the things that we always talk about for Power Platform, which, it’s a corny thing, but it’s that development is a team sport,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s corporate VP for its Low Code Application Platform, told me. “That’s one of our big focuses: how to bring people to collaborate and work together who normally don’t. This is great because it actually brings together the business users who live the process each and every day with a specialist who can build the robot and do the automation.”

The way this works in the backend is that Power Automate’s tools capture exactly what the users do and click on. All this information is then uploaded to the cloud and — with just five or six recordings — Power Automate’s systems can map how the process works. For more complex workflows, or those that have a lot of branches for different edge cases, you likely want more recordings to build out these processes, though.

Image Credits: Microsoft

As Lamanna noted, building out these workflows and process maps can also help businesses better understand the ROI of these automations. “This kind of map is great to go build an automation on top of it, but it’s also great because it helps you capture the ROI of each automation you do because you’ll know for each step how long it took you,” Lamanna said. “We think that this concept of Process Advisor is probably going to be one of the most important engines of adoption for all these low-code/no-code technologies that are coming out. Basically, it can help guide you to where it’s worth spending the energy, where it’s worth training people, where it’s worth building an app, or using AI, or building a robot with our RPA like Power Automate.”

Lamanna likened this to the advent of digital advertising, which for the first time helped marketers quantify the ROI of advertising.

The new process mining capabilities in Power Automate are now available in preview.

Celonis has made its name as a process discovery company, helping companies understand the way work flows through its systems to expose inefficiencies, but up until now the company has left it to others to solve those problems. Today it announced the first products that help companies improve those workflows automatically.

Alexander Rinke, founder and CEO at Celonis, says customers have been asking the company to go beyond process discovery to something that really helps solve the problems and bottlenecks they were finding.

“Where customers were really pushing us is to take the company from a software that’s showing you all the insights around your business processes, where the friction points are, where things aren’t going as they should be going…” he told TechCrunch.

To that end, the company acquired Banyas last year to give it a way to connect to internal ERP systems more easily, as they were thinking about how to create some process improvement automation apps. The Banyas acquisition gave the company some tools to start thinking about this more deeply.

“We put all of this together — the intelligence, the action, the automation and we solve business goals for certain departments,” Rinke said.

For starters, that involves supply chain and finance, but there are plans for building even more applications this year and beyond. The way it works for starters, is it connects to the company’s transactions systems, whether that’s SAP or Oracle or something similar. This is where the Banyas acquisition really comes into play,

“You can basically put these applications on top of your transaction systems and tell them which business goals you have — like I want to preserve cash or I want to pay on time — and then we analyze the enterprise’s entire processes towards these business goals, and then drive everything, automate things towards these business goals intelligently,” he said.

In addition to the two apps, the company is also announcing that it’s making the platform that the engineering team used to build these apps more broadly available to allow third parties to build their own apps on top of Celonis, and then they will be able to share them in an app marketplace.

If you’re thinking this is moving Celonis into Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Rinke disagrees As he sees it, RPA is about automating all-computer processes. He says the Celonis solutions often have human stopping points in a process, and he sees that as a big difference.

Celonis was founded in 2011 and has raised more than $367 million, according to Crunchbase data. Rinke reports the company has more than 1000 employees now.

Celonis created the idea of process mining, the act of automating the understanding and improvement of internal processes. But understanding the process in and of itself only gets you so far. Ultimately, companies need to use that information to improve the customer experience, and a new operational layer announced today could help them do that.

When we think about managing the customer experience, we tend to look at the consumer-facing app or the website. If that isn’t working right, or there is unnecessary friction in the buying process, then you can lose the customer.

But Celonis co-CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke says that eliminating friction at the front end of the process is only part of the equation. If there is a problem anywhere in the delivery system, from the manufacturer or warehouse to back-end systems, then that kind of friction can be just as problematic, he says.

“Where process mining really helps is it reveals where there’s friction. The biggest challenge companies face is that there’s a ton of operational friction. Things get stuck. Things get delivered late. Customer promises get broken,” he said.

Part of what makes Amazon work so well isn’t just that customers can easily place orders on a website or app, but also that Amazon has figured out how to pick the order and get it to the customer in the promised amount of time. If there were any delays in that process, people wouldn’t gravitate toward Amazon as much as they do.

But most companies don’t have the operational excellence of Amazon, and that’s where Celonis thinks it can help — by identifying the bumps in the operational road and finding ways to smooth those out in an automated fashion. “Initially, we sold a product for discovery, laying the land, understanding what’s going on in complex companies. And now we see more and more companies moving into operationalizing these insights, so acting on them, fixing things that are broken, and wanting to automate these fixes,” Rinke explained.

The company’s answer to this is the beta of Workflow Engine, a tool that is designed to help companies improve that operational flow. As it describes it, “The no-code, point-and-click workflow allows business analysts to arrange process steps and connect process flows across systems.” It includes templates out of the box for common tools like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, Jira, etc.

He says as an example, a company may have switched to electronic payments, but it’s finding customers aren’t moving with them. They can use the tool to identify those customers and offer a discount on their next order if they pay electronically without bothering the folks who are already doing it.

The company also announced a new tool to help connect easily to SAP systems. As Rinke points out, there are hundreds of these systems running the back end (finance, inventory, HR, etc.) at companies all over the world. It’s not always easy to connect to them because of their age and complexity.

To that end, the company revealed it has bought Banyas, a tool designed to help automate workflow from SAP systems, and one that should fit in nicely with the company’s vision to automate and understand process flows across large organizations.

Celonis was founded in 2011. Today it has more than 700 employees, and has raised almost $78 million.

 How do big businesses optimize IT-driven processes? Often by hiring management consultants to cast an expert eye over digital traceries and deliver recommendations for improving core operations like logistics and production. But Munich-based B2B SaaS startup Celonis reckons software can do a better job of flagging up areas where there’s room for business optimization. Its… Read More