Automation Hero Challenges Decade-Old RPA Vendors with New Intelligent Process Automation Platform and $14.5 Million Funding

Former Datameer Founding Team Accelerates International Expansion Amid Hyper Growth with Support from Skype Founder and Baidu Ventures

Breakout company, Automation Hero, secured a $14.5M investment led by Atomico and supported by Baidu Ventures (BV) and Cherry Ventures to lead the new generation of AI and data-centric Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). The startup is poised to dramatically shift the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market as companies search for new ways to automate business and IT processes. Its mission is to support information workers by automating mundane, repetitive tasks and give back time for more fulfilling higher value-add activities such as interacting with customers. Ben Blume, principal at Atomico, will join the Automation Hero board with this latest round of funding.

The team behind Automation Hero is not new to building disruptive, hyper-growth technology companies. Founder Stefan Groschupf has over 25 years of experience in machine learning and was one of the earliest big data activists working on the Apache Hadoop project. The team and Groschupf started the award-winning big data business intelligence company, Datameer, in 2009, which has counted more than 50 percent of the Fortune 50 companies as customers and secured a place in Gartner’s BI and Analytic Magic Quadrant in just five years.

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RPA + AI = IPA

The RPA market has seen extreme growth in the last few years, but current technology was architected over a decade ago and is limited to automating simple, repetitive click robots. Data integration, processing and machine learning are added as an afterthought and therefore intelligently automating more advanced business processes in complex IT environments remains challenging.

Automation Hero’s AI and big data-centric intelligent process automation platform tackles the problem with a completely new approach. Instead of running automations as isolated robots, Automation Hero’s platform runs highly scalable, distributed automation flows that weave together click robots, structured and unstructured data sources, deep learning, data processing and the human workforce into an intelligence fabric that creates an operating system for the modern enterprise.

The company is already seeing explosive global growth, especially within large enterprise sales organizations where there are high ROIs from automation. Its three primary use cases focus on eliminating manual repetitive, time-intensive tasks, automating common customer requests and augmenting sales rep decision making. Customers in financial services, telecommunications and travel and tourism have cited ROIs in the hundreds of millions by saving their employees up to one hour per day.

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Simplest Way to AI Automation

Even novice users can quickly automate repetitive business processes with Automation Hero’s simple-to-use automation recording capabilities. Advanced automations can be easily built from hundreds of functions in the platform’s intuitive point-and-click Flow Studio.

Data can be loaded or stored through one of the over 50 point-and-click connectors. Click robots can extract data from any kind of user interface and fill documents or forms in Web, Windows or Mac applications.

The no-code, visual AI Studio allows users to create operational, deep learning (TensorFlow) models for natural language processing, classification, recommendation, personalization or other business-relevant machine learning tasks.

It’s the only platform to personify attended automations as a personal AI assistant that handles repetitive tasks on behalf of the end user. The goal is to help alleviate the fear often invoked by AI and emphasize augmenting, not replacing the human worker. Unattended automations can also run completely autonomously on the cluster.

Automation Hero is available on-demand in the cloud or on-premise and is built from the ground up with the highest levels of security, data governance, customization and scalability in mind.

“Automation is the enterprise AI killer use case. However, the decade-old RPA technology out there has only slapped on AI – calling Cloud AI APIs or OCR tools. Given our experience we have built an enterprise-ready AI automation platform from the ground up,” said Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Automation Hero. “We’re already seeing our customers create automations in days, increase productivity and improve customer satisfaction with impressive revenue impact.”

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New Funding for Global Acceleration

This next round of funding was raised within just 12 months and brings the total investment to $19M. It will be used to accelerate Automation Hero’s growth, including the expansion of its international team. It most recently welcomed Peter Voss, former CTO of Datameer.

“Stefan is an experienced entrepreneur and exceptional technologist, with a relentless focus on building hyper growth companies with category-defining products that provide clear value to enterprise-scale customers. Intelligent Process Automation will drive a whole new kind of transformation across major business processes, and Automation Hero’s highly experienced team is incredibly well positioned to deliver this to organizations around the world,” said Ben Blume, principal at Atomico.

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