Automation vendor Workato raises $US200M at a $5.7B valuation

Business automation specialist Workato has raised another $200 million, this time in Series E funding led by Battery Ventures. The news comes just nine months after the company’s $110 million Series D.

Vijay Tella, Workato CEO

The business is now valued at $5.7B.

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Other participants in this latest round include Insight Partners, Altimeter Capital and Tiger Global. Geodesic Capital and Redpoint Ventures also participated in this round of financing. 

Automation is one of the hottest technology sectors with organisations trying to drive new efficiencies into their operations through a combination of integration, workflow automation, and RPA use cases.

For instance in February this year, UiPath raised $750 million in Series F valuing it at $35 billion. Other RPA specialists like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere have likewise joined the heralded club of tech unicorns off the back of strong demand for their equity from investors. 

Blue Prism sold out to Vista Equity Partners in September for $1.5B while Automation Anywhere is now said to be eyeing an IPO, according to Bloomberg.

Workato meanwhile says the new cash will fund accelerating global expansion product development, as well as fuel acquisitions like its recent purchase of application connector RailsData. 

Automation was already running hot before COVID hit but has benefited from the acceleration of digitalisation programs.

Workato is attempting to solve one of the more difficult challenges of RPA — scaling beyond departmental projects or even POCs (proof of concept). According to Vijay Tella, Workato CEO and co-founder, "Businesses are still struggling to achieve true transformation because RPA and integration tools cannot scale to address the needs of enterprises today."

Tella says Workato addresses this by providing a single platform for automation and integration that can be used by both Business and IT to address the challenges companies face when trying to automate at scale.

Traditional approaches by organisations to solving this problem such as deploying a variety of integration and automation tools to optimise their processes at the data, process, API and UX levels are highly inefficient, according to the company.