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If you hear the phrase ‘hybrid work’, your mind might turn to pyjama chic or the constant worry that you’re on mute. But there’s an even more important hybrid work trend underway: the rise of human + digital workforces.
With the help of automation tools — several of which we have previously backed at Dawn, such as Bryter, Swimm and Fonoa — companies are making processes more efficient and enabling their employees to focus on high-value tasks.
We take it for granted that employees have managers: they make sure that people show up on time, that they complete their tasks correctly, and that their work is aligned with the efforts of the wider organisation.
In just the same way, digital workers also need managers. Imagine an insurance claims process which moves from a hand-written submission (OCR), to claim categorisation (NLP), to manual review (human), to a query against internal systems (RPA), to a decision (human + AI), and then through a payments funnel (human + RPA). This spans business units and software stacks, and involves handoffs from human to digital workers; and if anything in the chain breaks, the whole process is derailed.
Today, enterprises are tackling this through manual operations and incident response units, which are staffed around the clock to ensure that everything remains on track. But to unlock the true potential of hyperautomation, there is an urgent need for something much more robust and scalable.
Enter RPA Supervisor, the pioneer of Intelligent Automation Management. Their governance layer ensures that each technology is co-ordinated not only within itself, but also with other tools and with human workers. Smart scheduling and adaptive resource allocation shift the paradigm from a rules-driven model to an SLA-based one. This means that in the insurance example outlined above, the company could set a one-hour turnaround and have confidence that this SLA will be met — which is hugely impactful in real-world operations.
As the name ‘RPA Supervisor’ suggests, the company’s entry point into this space is RPA, a multi-$bn software market that continues to grow rapidly. Already RPA Supervisor has established itself as a foundational investment to make any RPA programme successful, filling the hole left by RPA vendors’ lack of advanced orchestration features within their own platforms.
This is just the start. During our due diligence, calls with customers confirmed that RPA Supervisor is already helping them roll out RPA with greater speed and confidence than ever before. Imagine just how much more powerful RPA Supervisor will be when it extends beyond RPA and into the rest of the automation stack, helping companies orchestrate processes between RPA and Zapier and Celonis and Appian — the list goes on.
The result is one of the stickiest SaaS products we’ve ever seen, and rapid traction with a global client roster. This is no surprise given RPA Supervisor’s roots: the three co-founders — Erik, Tobias and Anders– met at Norwegian firm AVO Consulting, one of the early RPA specialists, meaning that they are steeped in the technical and business issues at stake. They started RPA Supervisor armed with an initial cheque from their old company and three decades of cumulative experience in the industry.
We are delighted to be leading the company’s Series A round, together with our friends at MMC and s16vc. RPA Supervisor are establishing themselves an indispensable enabler of the hyperautomation revolution, and we are excited to be supporting them on the journey.