Intel Capital leads $30 million investment in workplace automation platform Catalytic

Robotic process automation (RPA) software company Catalytic today announced the close of a $30 million funding round to grow the engineering, sales, and consulting divisions of its business. The funding will also be used to open offices in Palo Alto, New York, and possibly London, Catalytic CEO Sean Chou told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
RPA systems like the one from Catalytic are used to automate repetitive workplace tasks. Catalytic’s platform can take more than 200 actions to automate things like data processing by drawing unstructured data from documents, emails, internal systems, websites, and other sources.
Catalytic customers include Bosch, the Mayo Clinic, and consulting and certification company UL.
Chou said he sees Catalytic as comparable to RPA services on the market from companies like Blue Prism, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere.

“If you look at our customer base of large companies, almost all of them use an existing RPA vendor and some of them use multiple RPAs vendors,” Chou said.

The funding may also be used to expand Catalytic’s work with partner organizations. Approximately two-thirds of automated bots available to carry out workplace tasks today come from external partners, Chou said.
“We’ll have partners that provide a huge range of capabilities, and that’s actually been a really, really powerful mechanism for us, because they’re not just like an integration partner,” he said. “It’s a partner that gets completely embedded in our system, and customers can use them immediately and natively as anything that we built in. And they have to go out and source the company, they don’t have to create a contract with them, they don’t have to manage invoices separately, and so that’s actually a really big differentiator, too.”
The $30 million funding round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from Redline Capital and existing investors NEA, Boldstart, and Hyde Park Angels.
Established in August 2015, Catalytic currently has 60 employees and is based in Chicago.
Source: VentureBeat