San Fran­cisco (USA)/ Berlin — Brea­kout company Auto­ma­tion Hero has secu­red a $14.5 million invest­ment led by Atomico and backed by Baidu and Cherry Ventures that will help it become a leader in next-gene­ra­­tion AI and data-centric intel­li­gent process auto­ma­tion (IPA). The startup company aims to drama­ti­cally shift the market for robot-driven process auto­ma­tion (RPA) in an envi­ron­ment where compa­nies are looking for new ways to auto­mate busi­ness and IT processes.

The company’s mission is to help infor­ma­tion workers by auto­ma­ting mundane, repe­ti­tive tasks, free­ing up more time for more fulfil­ling, value-added acti­vi­ties like inter­ac­ting with custo­mers. Ben Blume, Prin­ci­pal of Atomico, joins Auto­ma­tion Hero’s Board of Direc­tors as part of this latest round of funding.

For the Auto­ma­tion Hero team, rapidly buil­ding disrup­tive tech­no­logy compa­nies is not new terri­tory. Foun­der Stefan Groschupf (photo) has over 25 years of expe­ri­ence in the field of machine lear­ning and was one of the first Big Data acti­vists to work on the Apache Hadoop project. The team and Groschupf foun­ded the award-winning Big Data busi­ness intel­li­gence company Data­meer in 2009, which counts more than 50 percent of Fortune 50 compa­nies among its custo­mers and has secu­red a spot in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Busi­ness Intel­li­gence and Analy­tics in just five years.

RPA + AI = IPA
The market for RPA has seen tremen­dous growth in recent years, but the current tech­no­logy was deve­lo­ped over a decade ago and is limi­ted to auto­ma­ting simple, repe­ti­tive click robots. Data inte­gra­tion, proces­sing, and machine lear­ning are added after the fact. Ther­e­fore, the intel­li­gent auto­ma­tion of more deman­ding busi­ness proces­ses in complex IT envi­ron­ments remains a challenge.

Auto­ma­tion Hero’s AI- and Big Data-centric intel­li­gent process auto­ma­tion plat­form tack­les the problem with an enti­rely new approach. Instead of running auto­ma­ti­ons as isola­ted robots, Auto­ma­tion Hero’s plat­form runs highly scalable, distri­bu­ted auto­ma­tion work­flows that combine click robots, struc­tu­red and unstruc­tu­red data sources, Deep Lear­ning, data proces­sing, and workers into an intel­li­gence network that crea­tes an opera­ting system for modern businesses.

The company is alre­ady seeing explo­sive global growth, parti­cu­larly in large sales orga­niza­ti­ons where the return on invest­ment gene­ra­ted by auto­ma­tion is high. The three main use cases focus on elimi­na­ting manual, repe­ti­tive, time-consum­ing tasks, auto­ma­ting common custo­mer inqui­ries that arise, and support­ing sales rep decis­ion making. Custo­mers in the finan­cial services, tele­com­mu­ni­ca­ti­ons, travel and tourism indus­tries report hundreds of milli­ons of dollars in return on invest­ment by saving their employees up to an hour of work per day.

New finan­cing to acce­le­rate global growth
This next round of funding was raised in just 12 months, brin­ging the total invest­ment to $19 million. It is used to acce­le­rate the growth of Auto­ma­tion Hero. The team most recently welco­med Peter Voss, former CTO of Data­meer, to its midst.

About Auto­ma­tion Hero
Auto­ma­tion Hero combi­nes RPA with AI to create a plat­form for intel­li­gent process auto­ma­tion that connects AI with the human work­force. By auto­ma­ting repe­ti­tive and time-consum­ing tasks, Auto­ma­tion Hero impro­ves produc­ti­vity and deli­vers more successful, opti­mi­zed busi­ness results.

Auto­ma­tion Hero is a port­fo­lio company of the leading capi­tal invest­ment compa­nies in AI and Deep Lear­ning ̶ Baidu USA, CometLabs, Cherry Ventures, signals VC and Atomico ̶ and is head­quar­te­red in San Fran­cisco (USA).