Tag: Automation

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Accounting automation startup Trullion lands $15M investment

Isaac Heller and Amir Boldo spent over ten years in finance across private equity-backed and pre-IPO companies. At these firms, they dealt with CFOs who wanted to save money by consolidating manual processes and reducing the cost of audits — in part by modernizing their sprawling software tooling.

It’s their experiences with CFOs that led Heller and Boldo to co-found Trullion, an accounting software platform that connects corporate controllers, CFOs and external auditors on a single platform, offering a unified source of truth for financial leaders — if the sales pitch is to be believed, at least.

“Trullion is and always has been an application layer software-as-a-service platform, leveraging open source AI libraries while building proprietary processing to unlock these accounting data sets and libraries,” Heller, Trullion’s CEO, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “CFOs can save significant money by consolidating manual processes and reducing cost of audit. Auditors, meanwhile, can modernize their toolset and reduce significant labor costs and error rate.”

There’s a strong desire to modernize in accounting, it seems. An IBM poll names accounts payable as one of the most automatable business processes, but a whopping 38% of those responding say that their teams spend more than 25% of their total time on manual tasks. In large finance teams — for example, those with more than 25 members — the number is even higher, at 44%. And for a sizable minority (11%), manual tasks take up more than half of their team’s time.

Trullion — which offers an array of lease accounting, “revenue recognition,” and audit automation tools — can extract data from lease contracts algorithmically, generating “audit-ready” reports for financial stakeholders. The platform also connects and manages customer relationship management software and billing and contract data, providing a dashboard with data sources in one place.

Beyond this, Trullion lets customers set product and pricing accounting strategies with automated workflows, which include preset revenue recognition rules. Managers can generate revenue forecasts or a full audit log and deliver ad hoc portal access to auditors.

“Trullion ingests structured and unstructured data and automates corporate accounting workflows based on generally accepted accounting principles and international financial reporting standards rules,” Heller went on to explain. “The current ecosystem is static enterprise resource platform databases (e.g., Oracle, SAP) and service-oriented auditors. Trullion is a pioneer in the early wave of AI-powered accounting platforms.”

Is Trullion truly a pioneer? That’s up for debate.

Rivals in the AI-powered accounting software space include Docyt, which has raised $1.5 million for its platform focused on collecting financial data, digitizing receipts, and performing categorization and reconciliation. Vic.ai — a startup that closed a $52 million tranche late last December — offers software to automate common accounting processes. There’s also Roger, a well-funded accounting automation module used to automate financial processes such as paying bills, doing approvals, scanning receipts, ensuring compliance and bookkeeping.

But to its credit, Trullion has substantial venture backing behind it, having raised $15 million from its initial Series A round led by Third Point. Today, the company secured an additional $15 million in a round led by StepStone Group with participation from Aleph, Third Point and Greycroft.

In a press release, aStepStone group partner said: “It’s a great company at a critical time in the accounting world. We believe this is the right time to get on board. The financial industry needs powerful, cost-effective technology that can automate critical processes and minimize risk. Companies are also discovering that AI and accounting automation [are] essential to keeping up with financial standards.”

There’s truth to that. According to a March survey by Intuit, 48% of accountants plan to invest in automation tools and AI over the next 12 months. Another, separate recent report found that 59% of small businesses — perhaps optimistically — don’t think that they’ll need an accountant in 10 years’ time thanks to automation.

Labor-saving potential aside, startups in the accounting automation space have done quite well in terms of attracting venture investment over the past several years. As per PitchBook (via the Wall Street Journal), AI-powered accounting software firms amassed $233.3 million in venture capital between January 2022 and the end of March 2022, surpassing the $210.2 million in funding for all of 2021.

Heller claims that Trullion has over 1,000 customers and 5,000 users.

“The pandemic has been positive for Trullion,” he continued. “This is a highly manual, service-oriented ecosystem that is eager for digital penetration.”

Trullion, based in New York and founded in 2020, has raised $33.5 million to date. Heller says that the plan is to grow the workforce from around 50 people to over 80 by the end of the year.

Accounting automation startup Trullion lands $15M investment by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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Ushur, which aims to automate aspects of the customer experience, raises $50M

Automation tech continues to attract funding in an increasingly challenging macroeconomic environment. That’s because of its cash-saving potential, no doubt. In a recent survey by Zapier — not the most unbiased source, granted, given that the company sells automation software — about 44% of employees say that automation saves them time while almost a third (33%) say it enables them to accomplish more with fewer resources.

One of the vendors benefiting from the interest is Ushur, which focuses specifically on automating aspects of companies’ customer experiences. The startup provides dashboards from where users can build AI-powered workflows for tasks like claims processing, customer support and appointment scheduling, letting organizations automate both business processes and front-office, customer-facing tasks (if the sales pitch is to be believed).

Ushur today announced that it raised $50 million in a Series C round led by Third Point Ventures with participation from investors Iron Pillar, 8VC, Aflac Ventures and Pentland Ventures. Bringing the startup’s total raised to $92 million, the funds will be put toward expanding Ushur’s product portfolio, developing new AI innovations and moving into new regions and industry verticals, according to CEO Simha Sadasiva.

Ushur, which Sadasiva co-founded in 2014 with ex-Lucent Technologies staffer Henry Peter, targets enterprises in heavily regulated industries such as insurance, healthcare, financial services and banking with tools designed to simplify the adoption of tech like conversational AI and intelligent document processing. For example, Ushur offers a chatbot-like plugin that provides automated customer support through web, mobile, email and live chat channels, proactively reaching out to customers with information specific to their needs and handling transactions across the different channels automatically.

“We optimize our [AI] models for industry-specific taxonomy and document types,” Sadasiva told TechCrunch in an email interview. “For example, in the insurance industry, ACORD forms are a standard. Ushur’s document models have been trained on all types of these forms … Another example is the training model we developed to triage millions of emails.”

Hearing all this, you might be wondering: What sets Ushur apart from the other enterprise automation firms out there? Fair question. After all, Jiffy.ai uses machine learning, AI and a design studio to help companies handle tasks that are usually performed manually — similar to what Ushur claims to offer. Meanwhile, SaaS Labs provides AI tools to automate certain sales and support processes. Then there’s incumbents like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, which occupy the enormous robotic process automation market.

Ushur

Image Credits: Ushur

Ushur, Sadasiva says, is differentiated by its dedication to plug-and-play, self-served customer experiences. Using the platform, IT teams can hook up existing systems to Ushur-provided APIs and data connectors before handing off the work to business teams, who can build automated experiences on top of Ushur’s templated workflows.

“Ushur’s flexible, AI-powered and true zero-code workflow environment doesn’t need support engineers designing or constantly tweaking it like some automation solutions do,” Sadasiva said. “Most companies can quickly deploy Ushur’s no-code platform with in-house citizen developers and IT teams.”

Sadasiva’s words are best taken with a grain of salt. No tech is foolproof — not even Ushur’s, assuming it’s indeed as good as claimed.

But differences of tech and opinion aside, Ushur has managed to build an objectively strong customer base, with brands like Aflac, Aetna, CVS Health and United Healthcare on the contractual hook for its services. Sadasiva says that more than 50% of Ushur’s clients are Fortune 500 companies and that the startup now serves three of the world’s top six healthcare companies.

The software sells itself, Sadasiva says. One recent survey found that businesses using customer experience automation software expected to double their revenue in 2022 compared to those using manual email marketing, marketing automation and customer relationship management tools. According to the same survey, customer experience automation led to more relevant communications and, in turn, better retention and customer acquisition.

“The pandemic dramatically accelerated Ushur’s business. During that time, Ushur more than doubled its customer base, tripled its headcount and expanded its footprint across three continents,” Sadasiva said. “As the world went remote, customer interactions shifted online … At the same time, businesses were hobbled by COVID-related staff shortages and were looking for ways to automate. Ushur gave businesses a way to provide self-served digital interactions over any channel on the customer’s schedule.”

While Ushur doesn’t have any government contracts at the moment, it sees this as a growth opportunity, according to Sadasiva. In fact, Ushur plans to expand into the public sector within the next 12 months, which will potentially include pursuing military contracts.

“Ushur is in an enviable position to not only weather but thrive in a prolonged economic downturn … Even if the economy tips into recession, the trends still favor our growth for the same reasons they did during the pandemic,” Sadasiva said. “In addition, our focus on solving real-world business problems and our disciplined yet practical approach to growth kept Ushur out of tight spots as we maintained a steep growth trajectory.”

There’s some truth to that. While Sadasiva wouldn’t disclose Ushur’s exact revenue (for competitive reasons, ostensibly), he said that the last four quarters were the biggest in the company’s history and that annual recurring revenue in 2022 eclipsed the total for the previous four years put together.

Ushur, which has 203 employees, plans to hire this year.

Ushur, which aims to automate aspects of the customer experience, raises $50M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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The thing we thought was happening with robotic investments is definitely happening

There was a brief, beautiful moment for a few months in 2021 when it felt like robotic investments might be immune from broader market forces. We all fundamentally and implicitly understood this to not be the case, but it was a nice moment nevertheless.

Truth is, there was a bit of insulation in there. There was still enough forward momentum to keep cruising for a bit, even as headwinds grew. But everything comes down to Earth eventually. Now that we’re roughly a month into 2023, we can begin assessing the damage. Looking at these graphs collated by Crunchbase, things seems fairly stark.

Image Credits: Crunchbase

A couple of top line points:

  • 2022 was the second worst year for robotics investments over the past five years.
  • The figures have been on a fairly steady decline for the past five quarters.

Per the first point, 2020 was the lowest. It was also an anomaly, what with the global pandemic. Uncertainty doesn’t breed investing confidence. The full year figure is even more striking given how investor confidence extended into early last year. Things really started slowing down in Q2. A cursory look at the bar graph might suggest that 2021 is an anomaly. Yes and no. Yes, as far as acceleration. No, as far as the long view. The question is not if those bars will start growing year over year, but when.

Image Credits: Crunchbase

The same thing that stalled investments in 2020 accelerated them the following year. Even as things reopened, jobs were increasingly difficult to fill and companies across the board were in a desperate push to automate. As nice as it might be, we’re not ready to classify automation and robotics as “recession-proof” just yet. I do, however, suspect that those who control the purse strings fundamentally understand that these downward trends are more a product of the macroenvironment than anything specific to robotics.

For some early-stage startups, however, that’s cold comfort. A lot of runways shortened dramatically this year. Consolation could come somewhere down the road, but in a lot of cases decisive action needs to be taken for those who suddenly find themselves unable to close a round that might have felt like a foregone conclusion 12 months ago.

Given the choice between getting acquired and shutting down that some will inevitably face, it seems likely that M&A activity will spike. Sure there’s less money floating around, but few can turn down a good fire sale. In some cases, that will go a ways toward strengthening products and portfolios.

Anecdotally, I’m seeing investments ramp up for the year, but that appears part of the natural cycle of companies waiting until after the holidays to announce. A proper bounce back, on the other hand, seems inevitable, but only those with high-powered crystal balls can say precisely when.

The thing we thought was happening with robotic investments is definitely happening by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

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Vic.ai raises $52M, shows that automating accounting processes can be profitable

AI is an imperfect technology, but one task at which it excels is identifying patterns in vast amounts of data. That’s perhaps why a number of startups have sprung up in recent years offering AI-powered products aimed at automating accounting tasks, like redacting sensitive info in paperwork and filing forms across different departments. Simply put, it’s low-hanging fruit.

That’s not suggest accounting-focused AI isn’t profitable — on the contrary. As something of a case in point, Vic.ai, which bills itself as an accounting automation platform, today announced that it raised $52 million in a Series A funding round led by GGV Capital and ICONIQ Growth with participation from Cowboy Ventures and Costanoa Ventures.

The new cash brings Vic.ai’s total raised to $115 million, which CEO Alexander Hagerup says is being put toward customer acquisition in North America and adding purchase order match, payment execution and “spend intelligence” capabilities to the Vic.ai platform.

“In this next stage of growth, Vic.ai will capitalize on the market’s urgent need to automate other elements of finance by expanding its AI solution to manage and analyze all these tasks,” Hagerup told TechCrunch in an email interview. “‘AI’ has been a hot concept for many years, but large enterprises are just now getting to the point where they’re ready to adopt at scale, and they’re doing so with a focus on specific functions such as accounting and finance.”

Vic.ai was founded in 2017 by Hagerup and Kristoffer Roil, both Norwegian entrepreneurs. Prior to co-launching Vic.ai, Hagerup founded the Online Backup Company, a European backup and disaster recovery service provider. Roil spearheaded the founding of Telipol, a wireless carrier in Norway that was later acquired by Hudya Group, a Nordic fintech company.

Hagerup and Roil say that they built the first iteration of Vic.ai by training the platform on historical accounting data and processes from tens of thousands of public companies. The training data set contained accounting documents and corresponding journal entries that were reviewed by accountants at consultancy firms, including PricewaterhouseCoopers. This “live usage” helped to train Vic.ai’s machine learning algorithms over time, according to Hagerup, enabling it to provide nearly “complete autonomy” for transaction processing.

Vic.ai primarily handles invoice processing, leveraging the aforementioned algorithms to select invoices and expenses that meet a certain confidence threshold and automatically send them to approvers. The platform also determines the number of steps in an invoice approval process and automatically decides which employee needs to review each step.

Hagerup says that Vic.ai uses the invoices that it processes for customers to improve the performance of its algorithms. Data on the platform is retained for seven years, but Vic.ai maintains a “strict separation” of U.S. and EU data to comply with GDPR and makes an effort to discard personally identifiable information, he says.

Unlike some AI vendors, Vic.ai has the good fortune of occupying an industry that’s beginning to embrace automation. A 2021 survey of roughly 200 companies and financial institutions found that, while management priorities and IT availability remain the top blockers to automated workflows, just over a third of respondents said that they planned to spend “more or significantly more” on accounts payable automation technology within the next two years.

Vic.ai’s customer base reflects this. According to Hagerup, the company now has 60 enterprise customers, including HSB, Intercom and Armanino, with an active user base that’s grown 280% compared to 2021. Vic.ai’s contracted annual recurring revenue tripled in 2022 as compared to 2021 ($5 million), he added.

“As a true AI company, Vic.ai is changing accounts payable automation into true autonomy. While some of our competitors offer solutions based on rules and templates, our unique approach sets us apart from the status quo,” Hagerup said. “Moving operations from on-prem manual routines via email or spreadsheet into a cloud based solution with audit trails and compliance features is favorable to IT C-level managers … We’re well positioned for an economic downturn.”

Vic.ai competes against vendors such as Upflow, Glean AI and Quadient-owned YayPay in the accounts receivables management and automation space. (For context, the accounts payable automation market alone is estimated to grow from $1.9 billion in 2019 to $3.1 billion by 2024, according to MarketsandMarkets.) Tipalti is perhaps the most formidable, having raised $270 million at an $8.3 billion valuation last December.

To beat back its rivals, New York–based Vic.ai has expanded rapidly — it tripled its headcount to 106 employees this year — and invested in building out its AI-powered purchase order matching technology, which it sees as a key differentiator.

Vic.ai raises $52M, shows that automating accounting processes can be profitable by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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Flowers Software helps SMBs manage their workflows

Workflow automation may not be what gets you out of bed every morning, but it has long been a hot topic in the world of enterprise software. There are few businesses, after all, that don’t have dozens and dozens of repetitive workflows that are currently done manually that could be automated. Munich-based Flowers Software, which originally launched in 2019, is trying to put its own stamp on this field by offering a somewhat different approach from many of its competitors.

The company today announced that it has raised a $3.2 million seed funding round led by La Famiglia VC, with participation from LEA Partners and Collective Ventures. A number of angel investors also participated, including Personio’s co-founder Ignaz Forstmeier, SAP Hybris’ founder Carsten Thoma, SevDesk founders Fabian Silberer and Marco Reinbold, and Ironhack co-founder Gonzalo Manrique.

Image Credits: Flowers Software

Founded by Andreas Martin and Daniel Vöckler, who both spent time working at a number of small and medium businesses, Flowers currently focuses its marketing on two use cases: invoice approvals and general approvals. But the idea behind the tool is to offer a highly flexible no-code workflow tool to automate virtually any repetitive business process.

“When we founded Flowers, we already knew that we were going to solve this major problem because of our experience from our previous jobs, the different industries and company sizes, etc.,” said Martin. “What we learned is that there are tons of tasks that go wrong in every company literally every day. […] And unfortunately, since most tasks are in recurring workflows, they go wrong repeatedly. For all of those problems, you will find one tool that solves exactly this problem. So you can have 1,000 problems and 1,001 tools solving them. But Daniel and I didn’t want to create another single-solution tool.”

Flowers team photo.

Flowers team photo. Image Credits: Flowers Software

Martin noted that many traditional workflow automation tools focus on the backend, while Flowers provides anyone in the company with tools to build these workflows but also access to a user interface to step through these workflows from beginning to end. He noted that this also helps to make information more accessible and transparent to everyone inside a company. And while users can integrate a lot of third-party tools, for many of the current use cases, teams are doing a lot of their work in Flowers themselves.

The team actually started building Flowers as a general-purpose automation tool but found that simply giving its users all of this freedom only led to confusion. So after some trial and error, Flowers decided to build out a few templates for common use cases — invoicing being one of those — and with that, the service took off. What the team needs to do now — and what Flowers will use at least some of the new funding for — is building out templates for more use cases so it can expand its user base. The team also plans to expand its marketing efforts to go beyond its current core market of most German-speaking countries to more of Europe and North America.

Image Credits: Flowers Software

“We’re going to launch with different use cases in different countries, or service work for use cases in every country, but some countries have more problems with contracts and approvals, or travel expenses,” Martin explained. “Our highly adaptable software makes it possible for us to support those laws, regulations and compliance rules very easily because the tool is flexible enough.”

Flowers Software was already cashflow positive early on in its history, but the team decided to raise now in order to be able to grow faster and capture more of the market. “We really want to push as hard as we can and scale as hard as we can,” said Martin.

“Flowers is changing the game for SMBs in business efficiency, productivity and profitability with a different approach to workflow creation and automation that is resonating with many customers across industries,” said Judith Dada, general partner at La Famiglia VC. “With Flowers, companies finally have a software that adapts to the way they work, rather than a software that requires the customer to change. We’re impressed by the product and strong sales traction that Andreas, Daniel and the team have already acquired and are excited to support them as they scale to new markets.”

Flowers Software helps SMBs manage their workflows by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

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With a $13B valuation, Celonis defies current startup economics

When Celonis, an 11-year-old German process mining company, announced a $1 billion raise in August on a $13.2 billion post-money valuation, it was a bit of a shock. After all, VC firms were pulling back from the huge raises and gaudy valuations of yesteryear.

But Celonis — which has raised $2.4 billion, per Crunchbase, with $2 billion coming in the last year alone — has been able to defy the current thinking in startup circles by taking on huge chunks of capital.

Consider that its valuation has grown an eye-popping 420% since 2019, when it raised $290 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. That was followed last year with $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, culminating in August’s $13 billion valuation.

Part of the reason it’s such a valuable company is that along the way, it’s forged partnerships with corporate giants like IBM and ServiceNow to sell its software, helping push Celonis into markets where even well-funded startups might be limited by the resource requirements.

No code, workflow and RPA line up for their automation moment

It’s also been able to fill in the platform with several strategic acquisitions (more on that later).

Why are customers, investors, and partners so interested in Celonis?

Because Celonis, using software, can dig into the way processes move through a company, looking at complex areas like procurement, bill paying, and inventory and searching for inefficiencies and duplications that can ultimately add up to huge savings.

This is the kind of work that high-priced consultants have tended to do, camping inside companies for months or years and figuring out how work flows through the organization while collecting fat checks to do it.

Having software that can replace those human efficiency experts, and in fairly short order, is a tremendous advantage.

With a $13B valuation, Celonis defies current startup economics by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

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Microsoft announces Syntex, a set of automated document and data processing services

Two years ago, Microsoft debuted SharePoint Syntex, which leverages AI to automate the capture and classification of data from documents — building on SharePoint’s existing services. Today marks the expansion of the platform into Microsoft Syntex, a set of new products and capabilities including file annotation and data extraction. Syntex reads, tags and indexes document content — whether digital or physical — making it searchable and available within Microsoft 365 apps and helping manage the content lifecycle with security and retention settings.

According to Chris McNulty, the director of Microsoft Syntex, driving the launch was customers’ increasing desire to “do more with less,” particularly as a recession looms. A 2021 survey from Dimensional Research found that more than two-thirds of companies leave valuable data untapped, largely because of problems building pipelines to access that data.

“Just as business intelligence transformed the way companies use data to drive business decisions, Microsoft Syntex unlocks the value of the massive amount of content that resides within an organization,” McNulty told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Virtually any industry with large scale content and processes will see benefits from adopting Microsoft Syntex. In particular, we see the greatest alignment with industries that work with a higher volume of technically dense and regulated content – financial services, manufacturing, health care, life sciences, and retail among them.”

Syntex offers backup, arc1hiving, analytics and management tools for documents as well as a viewer to add annotations and redactions to files. Containers enable developers to store content in a managed sandbox, while “scenario accelerators” provide workflows for use cases like contract management, accounts payable and so on.

“The Syntex content processor lets you build simple rules to trigger the next action, whether it’s a transaction, an alert, a workflow or just filing your content in the right libraries and folders,” McNulty explained. “[Meanwhile,] the advanced viewer adds an annotation and inking layer on top of any content viewable in Microsoft 365. Annotations can be made securely, with different permissions than the underlying content, and also without modifying the underlying content.”

McNulty says that customers like TaylorMade are exploring ways to use Syntex for contract management and assembly, standardizing contracts with common clauses around financial terms. The company is also piloting the service to process orders, receipts and other transactional documents for accounts payable and finance teams, in addition to organizing and securing emails, attachments and other documents for intellectual property and patent filings.

“One of the fastest-growing content transactions is e-signature,” McNulty said. “[With Syntex, you] can send electronic signature requests using Syntex, Adobe Acrobat Sign, DocuSign or any of our other e-signature partner solutions and your content stays in Microsoft 365 while it’s being reviewed and signed.”

Intelligent document processing of the type Syntex does is often touted as a solution to the problem of file management and orchestration at scale. According to one source, 15% of a company’s revenue is spent creating, managing and distributing documents. Documents aren’t just costly — they’re time-wasting and error-prone. More than nine in 10 employees responding to a 2021 ABBY survey said that they waste up to eight hours each week looking through documents to find data, and using traditional methods to create a new document takes on average three hours and incurs six errors in punctuation, spellings, omissions or printing.

A number of startups offer products to tackle this, including Hypatos, which applies deep learning to power a wide range of back-office automation with a focus on industries with heavy financial document processing needs. Flatfile automatically learns how imported data from files should be structured and cleaned, while another vendor, Klarity, aims to replace humans for tasks that require large-scale document review, including accounting order forms, purchase orders and agreements.

As with many of its services announced today, Microsoft, evidently, is betting scale will work in its favor.

“Syntex uses AI and automation technologies from across Microsoft, including summarization, translation and optical character recognition,” McNulty said. “Many of these services are being made available to Microsoft 365 commercial accounts with no additional upfront licensing under a new pay-as-you-go business model.”

Syntex is beginning to roll out today and will continue to roll out in early 2023. Microsoft says it’ll have additional details on service pricing and packaging published on the Microsoft 365 message center and through licensing disclosure documentation in the coming months.

Microsoft announces Syntex, a set of automated document and data processing services by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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Thanks to AI, you can now create automations in Power Automate by simply describing them

Power Automate, Microsoft’s Power Platform service that helps users create workflows between apps, is getting new AI smarts. During its Ignite conference, Microsoft rolled out capabilities powered by OpenAI’s Codex, the code-generating machine learning system underpinning GitHub Copilot. Starting today (in public preview), Power Automate users can write what they want to automate in natural language and have Codex generate suggestions to jumpstart the flow creation.

It’s Microsoft’s latest move to more tightly integrate the various technologies from OpenAI, the San Francisco AI startup in which it has invested $1 billion, into its family of products. Two years ago, Microsoft introduced a Power Apps feature that used GPT-3, OpenAI’s text-generating system, to create formulas in Power Fx, Power Platform’s programming language. Microsoft also continues to evolve Azure OpenAI Service, a fully managed, enterprise-focused platform designed to give businesses access to OpenAI innovations with governance features.

“Our goal is that anywhere in the ecosystem that a person would need to write code they have the flexibility to start with natural language too, and Codex is core to that strategy,” Stephen Siciliano, VP of Power Automate, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “[These are] new tools that will help users eliminate tedious work and free up time for workers to focus on more high value projects.”

Microsoft Power Automate Codex

Image Credits: Microsoft

Using the new Codex-powered tool, Power Automate users can describe the type of workflow automation they’d like to create in a sentence. Codex will then translate this into flow recommendations, which — when set up with the appropriate connectors — can be fine-tuned within Power Automate’s flow designer to create an automated workflow.

Siciliano says that the feature will support “key” Microsoft 365 connectors at launch, and that there will be additional integrations in the coming months.

“We have fine-tuned Codex primarily with the thousands of templates that we have for Power Automate cloud flows today,” he added. Originally, Codex was trained on billions of lines of public code in languages like Python and JavaScript to suggest new lines of code and functions given a few snippets of existing code. “These templates are a combination of Microsoft-built and community submitted scenarios, so they cover a breadth of use cases and everything from very simple to more advanced flows.”

When asked about the longer-term roadmap, Siciliano declined to reveal much. But he suggested that Codex might come to more places within Power Platform in the future.

“[T]here are many different places in the Power Platform where natural language may be useful, so you’ll see a broader rollout,” he continued. “Moreover, we will continue to enhance the accuracy of the [system] over time as well.”

The new Codex-Power Automate integration dovetails with enhancements to AI Builder, which also landed this morning. (AI Builder, a built-in Power Automate feature, lets users add AI capabilities and models to automated flows.) AI Builder now offers users the ability to train AI systems on the data they might want to extract from documents, allowing Power Automate to pull data in freeform documents such as contracts, statements of work and letters, even from tables that span several pages. Microsoft says the document-processing capabilities of AI Builder now support 164 languages, including handwritten Japanese.

Thanks to AI, you can now create automations in Power Automate by simply describing them by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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The Berlin startup that wants to give Zapier a run for its money

Zapier and IFTTT are, today, very large platforms for creating automation rules for texts or getting two apps to “talk” to each other via APIs. However, these are ‘hammers to crack nuts’ when it comes to processing simple tasks needed inside businesses. Furthermore, if you include images or video, or if the text referred to is unstructured, tools that require that structure won’t work so well, if at all.

This was the thinking behind the Berlin-based Levity startup. It came up with a way for businesses to create AI-powered, ‘no-Code’ rules for automating tasks in a way that non-technical people can use.

It’s now raised $8.3 million in seed funding, co-led by Balderton Capital (out of London) and Chalfen Ventures, as well as a number of Angels.

Founded by Gero Keil and Thilo Hüllmann, Levity allows businesses to use simple templates to automate workflows, with, says the firm, an underlining AI which takes care of the heavy lifting. This uses NLP and computer vision in a single horizontal platform to parse unstructured data types – such as images, texts, and documents. Levity’s customers range from fashion and real estate to shipping, marketing, social media, scientific research, and others. 

Typical use cases include automatically tagging and routing incoming emails or email attachments; triaging customer support tickets; sorting incoming documents into respective folders; or tagging visual inventory data, such as product photos.

A little like Zapier, the platform integrates with Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive, Dropbox,  Airtable, and others. The startup says the system is also SOC2 Type I certified and GDPR compliant.

In a statement, Gero Keil, co-founder and CEO of Levity said: “Businesses and their customers deserve the same opportunities to reap the benefits of AI and automation as their bigger rivals.”

The platform launched this past August subscription prices start at $200 per month.

James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital added: “There is an increasing divide between companies with the means to capitalize on AI and automation, and those smaller businesses who lack the resources to do so.  Levity is on a mission to close this divide.”

The Berlin startup that wants to give Zapier a run for its money by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

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Codacy nabs $15M to improve code reviews with automation

Code review is a key step during the software development process — it’s when people check a program by viewing and reading parts of the source code. But despite its importance, not all developers are pleased with the way traditional code reviews work. For example, a Microsoft study found that the outcomes of code reviews often don’t match the motivations, whether because of unrealistic expectations or insufficient developer resources.

Aiming to change code reviews for the better, Jaime Jorge co-founded Codacy, which provides info on code quality, security, compliance and performance. Fresh off the launch of a new product designed to measure engineering performance metrics, Lisbon-based Codacy has closed a $15 million Series B funding round led by Bright Pixel Capital, the corporate VC of one of Portugal’s biggest employers, the Sonae Group.

To date, Codacy has raised $28 million.

“In order to stay competitive in a world where every company is software led, companies need to balance quality with speed of delivery,” Jorge told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The industry adoption of remote work has sent companies into disarray, creating tension between engineers who earn for flexibility and freedom and managers who are accountable for results. Many companies have wrongly taken to monitoring as solutions, which long term deteriorate culture and hinder them from hiring and keeping the best talent possible.”

Jorge did a master’s thesis focused on identifying duplicate code, which piqued his interest in the business of code review. He teamed up with Codacy’s other co-founder, João Caxaria, to launch the startup in 2012.

Codacy

Image Credits: Codacy

Since Codacy’s founding ten years ago, the code review market has grown substantially, with companies like SonarSource and DeepCode — whose platforms scan codebases for bugs — raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. Incumbents like Amazon have thrown their hats in the ring, too (see: CodeGuru).

But Jorge argues that the scale of Codacy’s platform is indicative of its success. Over the last 12 months, the platform spotted more than 20 million vulnerabilities and, Jorge claims, decreased the time developers spend on quality reviews by up to 60%.

We’ll have to take his word for it — stats like those are tough to independently confirm. But what is verifiable is that Codacy sees a strong business opportunity beyond code reviews in the area of engineering performance monitoring. That’s the focus of Pulse, the company’s second product, which aims to measure things like software deployment frequency, lead time for changes to code and other aspects of software development that correlate with “business impact.”

“Pulse gathers metrics that enable teams to understand performance without compromising a healthy culture,” Jorge said. “We’ve seen firsthand in our customers the struggles of maintaining a healthy performance culture over remote work. Pulse aims to help in this process.”

Surely not every developer will be on board with the idea of close watch over their work. On the other hand, it might not matter if managers see a benefit to quantifying, or at least attempting to quantify, individual contributions to projects.

Jorge said that Codacy “routinely” deletes customer data, including performance metrics, that are “no longer required to maintain the normal functioning operation of [the company’s] product[s].”

“We’ve found over time that … leadership tends to care for metrics that are closer to larger business outcomes. In other words, leadership cares for the forest and not the trees. This is why we designed Pulse: to provide a meaningful, cohesive set of metrics that leadership cares about,” Jorge said, asserting that Pulse isn’t invasive by nature. “This way, they follow what their colleagues in other departments are already doing by measuring performance while not compromising their engineering culture.”

Codacy appears to be doing something right, with a customer base of around 870 brands, including Panasonic and Delivery Hero, and a user base exceeding 300,000 developers. Jorge says that the funding will be put mostly toward product R&D, including adding new capabilities to Codacy’s existing services, bringing new services to market and hiring senior talent across the company’s engineering, support, and success teams as well as sales and marketing. (Codacy’s headcount stands at 100 staffers today.)

“The broader slowdown in tech is proving to be beneficial to us as companies are hoping to automate processes while keeping quality solid and understand their engineering performance. Despite the frequency of layoffs in the industry, we’ve seen many of our customers actually expand in usage of our product suite,” Jorge continued. “We’re really bullish on the timeless, dependent nature of software development. It does not depend on cycles and its momentum is built on the back of a worldwide digital transformation. Now is the time to be greedy on the fact that every company wants to be software-led.”

Codacy nabs $15M to improve code reviews with automation by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch