It's no secret that there has been explosive growth in the number of software applications used by organizations over the past several years – a recent report from Productiv suggests that the average enterprise company has 364 cloud apps! Companies adopt these applications to help their employees do their jobs more efficiently, but the sheer number of different applications and the difficulty integrating them often gives rise to siloed data and fragmented business processes across the organization.
This lack of integration is an even bigger problem as organizations begin to shift their focus toward process automation. If you're unable to make your apps talk to each other, how can you hope to automate complex workflows across them? Companies have historically tried to address this with a variety of different tools that support application integration and automation – an inefficient process that requires in-depth involvement from IT each step of the way. Line-of-business users are often frustrated that they're unable to automate their core workflow themselves.
Workato addresses this need with a single platform for automation and integration that can be used by both IT and business users. With Workato, users can create automated workflows from scratch or leverage one of the company's hundreds of thousands of pre-existing "recipes" to automate common business processes across different applications. For example, an HR professional can leverage a Workato recipe to make new employee onboarding an easy, automated process: when a new hire is made, the candidate data will automatically be moved from the ATS to HCM platform, an e-signature process will be triggered to get key documents signed, the service management platform will be pinged to provision apps & devices, and the payroll system will be updated.
At Insight, we were extremely impressed with Workato since first getting to know Vijay Tella, Workato's founder and CEO, back in 2019. He and his team had extensive experience in the application integration space, and it was clear their end-to-end approach to workflow automation (encompassing data prep, workflow recipes, and user interface/analytics) represents the next generation of business process automation and differentiated Workato from the previous generation of such tools. There was also already some impressive market validation at that point, as Workato was the only startup to be recognized by Gartner as a Leader in their Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service Magic Quadrant. Most importantly, however, every Workato customer we spoke with was passionate about the product and was increasing their usage each quarter they used it (regardless of whether they were in business or IT). It was clear that Workato was filling a real market need, and we were excited to co-lead Workato's Series D financing in 2020.
It hasn't quite been a year since that round closed, but it's certainly been a busy time for the team at Workato – the company has more than doubled new ARR, customer count, and employee headcount since last year's financing! As if that weren't enough, they also hosted their first user conference which was attended by more than 12,000 participants, acquired RailsData to accelerate the pace of building application connectors, and were named as a Leader by in the Gartner EiPaaS Magic Quadrant for the 4th year running. Market demand for integration and automation solutions has continued to grow, and Workato is better positioned to capitalize on that growing demand than ever before.
Insight as a firm has been built to support ScaleUp software companies like Workato throughout their journey. Now, we're excited to have the opportunity to double down on our investment in the company by co-leading its $200M Series E alongside our friends at Battery, Altimeter, and Tiger to help fund Workato’s exciting next stage of growth. We look forward to continuing to work with Vijay and his team as they build the leader in enterprise automation.
Behind the Investment: Workato — Doubling Down on Automated Workflows for the Modern Enterprise
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