Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
Much has been (and will continue to be) written about automation’s impact on the jobs market. In the short term, many employers have complained of an inability to fill roles and retain workers, further accelerating robotic adoption. The long-term impact these sorts of sweeping changes will have on the job market going forward remains to […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
The story of warehouse robotics is a story of attempting to keep up with Amazon. It’s been more than a decade since the online giant revolutionized its delivery services through its Kiva Systems acquisition. As Walmart works to remain competitive, it’s taking a more piecemeal approach to automation, through partnerships with a range of different […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Sprinto, a startup offering a security compliance and risk platform, has raised $20 million in new investment led by Accel.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Since the last time we spoke, Viam didn’t pivot exactly, according to founder and CEO Eliot Horowitz — it’s more of a “rebrand.” Roughly six months ago, the Manhattan-based startup made a concerted effort to broaden its focus. The no-code development platform previously focused its outreach on robotics firms. It’s a large and rapidly expanding […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
UiPath was a startup darling with a $35B valuation, but the public markets proved rougher until the company diversified its product line.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
After two years of flying high, industrial robot orders dropped by nearly one-third last year. Per the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), 31,159 industrial robots were purchased by North American companies in 2023, down from 44,196. That marks a 30% drop for this key market. The number is also down (albeit less so) from 2021’s […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Parabola, a San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to help expedite back-office processes, particularly in the logistics and ecommerce sectors, today announced that it raised $24 million in a Series B funding round led by OpenView with participation from strategic investor Flexport alongside Matrix, Thrive, Flexport, Good Friends, Webflow, Otherwise Fund, Abstract Ventures and Merus Capital.
Alex Yaseen, Parabola’s founder and CEO, says that the new capital will be put toward hiring and product R&D. To date, the company’s raised $34.2 million — inclusive of the latest tranche.
“Most software companies struggled in the pandemic shift, but we’ve found success,” Yaseen said. “2023 is the year of the operator, and Parabola is the go-to platform to empower them.”
So what does Parabola do, exactly? Boiled down to basics, the platform applies AI to automate various workflows. Using Parabola, customers can take documents like PDFs, text message logs, images and emails and have Parabola standardize, enrich or categorize them.
For example, given a list of product names, Parabola can categorize them according to specific departments, such as “clothing,” “home goods,” “grocery” and “electronics.” It can also standardize inconsistently-formatted invoices and extract the amount, due date, sender information and the line items from each into a table. And it can analyze Amazon keyword rankings within a specific time frame, enabling ecommerce teams to optimize their product listings.
Yaseen describes Parabola as a “collaborative data tool” for nontechnical users who’d otherwise be stuck with arduous manual processes and spreadsheets.
“Our core differentiator is our ability to be owned directly by an operations team to build solutions to their own problems without getting bottlenecked on data and IT.” Yaseen said. “This enables them to automate workflows that otherwise are too fast-changing for engineers to write code on their behalf.”
Business process automation is a growing trend, with 66% of organizations responding to a recent McKinsey survey saying that they’ve experimented with process automation in one or more business functions. The motivation is cost savings, often. A UiPath survey estimates that businesses can save an average of $1.5 million per year by automating at least a portion of their processes.
Parabola’s workflow automation platform connects apps and automates processes.
Lots of vendors have emerged to meet the large addressable market, unsurprisingly, including so-called integration-platform-as-a-service providers like Zapier, Workato, Tray and Mulesoft as well as internal-tool-building platforms like Retool and Airplane.dev. Retool has done particularly well for itself lately, raising $45 million at a $3.2 billion valuation last July.
Yaseen makes the case that Parabola’s rivals, though — even the well-funded ones — focus less on building logic and more on transferring data between different systems, plus require extensive technical resources to boot.
“Many users choose to stick with their outdated and mundane processes because it’s what they’re familiar with, and they believe that their complex data sets cannot be automated,” he added. “[But] enterprise leaders can no longer exhaust valuable engineering resources on projects that can be achieved otherwise … We’ve built a suite of collaboration features that turn the ‘individual use-case’ into a ‘company use-case,’ allowing operations teams to align on best practices and ultimately build off one another’s work.”
Parabola claims to have clients in a “wide range of industries,” including ecommerce, retail, consumer packaged goods and shipping and logistics. The 30-employee startup’s current customer base stands at just over 500 brands, and Yaseen says that the plan is to expand Parabola’s headcount to 60 people by the end of the year.
Workflow automation startup Parabola raises $24M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Working in customer support often means navigating disjointed tools to find data and solve issues. However, many of these actions are routine and repeatable, making them ideal candidates for automation. 8Flow.ai, which is launching out of stealth today and announcing a $6.6 million seed funding round, wants to do exactly this.
The company is rolling out an enterprise-grade, self-learning workflow automation engine that integrates with tools like Zendesk, ServiceNow and Salesforce Service Cloud to assist agents in their daily tasks. But that’s only step one. The company then plans to use all of this data to train machine-learning models to generate AI-led workflows that are tailored to each user’s needs.
8Flow co-founders Josh Russ, Yev Goldin, Boaz Hecht Image Credits: 8flow
“Ultimately, where we are headed is that we’re building a tool that learns what an agent is doing today,” 8Flow co-founder and CEO Boaz Hecht told me. “But in the end, it really doesn’t matter if you’re a support agent, or you’re a finance person, or you’re an HR person, or whatever — the point is, we’re building an engine that learns in order to build a model that is then rich enough to be used.”
Right now, though, the team is still focused on phase one and on optimizing the user interface and experience. Hecht noted that this already helps out agents quite a bit and creates enough value for enterprises to pay for the product today. In addition, it also allows 8Flow to capture data and collect feedback.
“The idea is that we’re capturing data — we’re collecting the feedback — meaning we’re iterating for the agent on what they’re doing,” he explained. “Then, as they do that, we observe what they do and then we create — I almost think of it like building Lego bricks from the bottom up — we learn what bricks need to be built. Once we build the bricks, we learn how you put them together. And once you put them together, we see what you’ve built and we recreate those into pre-built workflows.”
Image Credits: 8flow
Currently, this takes the form of a Chrome extension that can automatically copy and paste relevant data from one application to another. The tool automatically learns common steps for each agent and then presents them as actions they can trigger with a single click.
As Hecht noted, fulfilling an order return, for example, may take dozens of clicks for a support agent, but it should really only be a handful because most steps are about copying and pasting data from one application to another. There are only a few steps where the agent has to make a decision (to issue the refund or not, for example) — and ideally, that’s what a tool like 8Flow allows those agents to focus on.
“8Flow has allowed my team to significantly increase efficiency and accuracy,” said Heather English, a senior customer support manager at FloorFound. “We save hours using 8Flow to eliminate the need to switch between browser tabs to copy and paste data. We’re excited about their roadmap ahead, as each release results in freeing up more valuable time for our team members.”
There’s also an additional benefit here for businesses, as they get data about which tools their agents actually use (and which they can cancel because they aren’t being used) and how they use them.
Image Credits: 8flow
Hecht is no stranger to workflow automation. He was also the co-founder and CEO of SkyGiraffe, an early enterprise mobility platform, which he then sold to ServiceNow in 2017. After that, he stayed at ServiceNow until March 2022, ultimately becoming the VP of Platform, leading the company’s teams that focused on its core platform, mobile, AI chatbots and most employee-facing products. By late 2021, he decided that he wanted to build another startup, though, taking former SkyGiraffe and ServiceNow colleagues Josh Russ and Yev Goldin with him to co-found the company.
While 8Flow’s focus right now is on support agents, largely because that’s the market the founding team knows best, there’s no reason it couldn’t add just as much value to businesses in other verticals as well.
8Flow‘s seed round was led by Caffeinated Capital, with BoxGroup, Liquid2, HNVR and Trilogy also joining the round. A number of prominent angel investors, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu, and Snowflake CFO Michael Scarpelli, also participated.
8Flow.ai raises $6.6M to automate customer support workflows by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch