A note from our founders Vijay Tella (CEO) and Gautham Viswanathan (Head of Products)
Today we announced our Series C funding in which we raised $70M to take the benefits of Enterprise Automation to more businesses around the world. We are excited to welcome Satish Dharmaraj of Redpoint, Sean Jacobsohn of Norwest, and Ashvin Bachireddy of Geodesic to the Workato family along with our returning investors Battery and Storm.
We created BusinessWorks at TIBCO, the original enterprise integration platform that became blueprint for the vendors that followed. Thanks to the explosion of SaaS and dramatically different business expectations of scale, speed, agility, and costs, the businesses of today require a very different type of platform – an enterprise automation platform. It is amazing for us to be in a position to once again drive change in the industry we helped start.
We started Workato with the mission to create a single enterprise platform that covers all the core automation use cases around Workflows, iPaaS, high volume data integrations, bots, and AI/ML. The hardest part, however, was building a platform that is awesome for both IT and business. We knew unlocking Digital Transformation would have to be a team sport and that meant enabling more doers beyond IT, with security and guardrails, to enable wall-to-wall automations.
It was a hard nut to crack to deliver simplicity in an inherently complex space, and we’re still on that journey today thanks to the passion, creativity, energy, and partnership of our customers. It continues to inspire us, and has motivated us to aim even higher. When we hear customers use words like ‘magic,’ ‘joyful,’ and ‘game changing’ to describe Workato — words not often associated with integration platforms — it renews our vigor.
Where we are now
Since our Series B round last year, our core business ARR and the number of platform customers have nearly quadrupled. But what we find even more exciting are the metrics around adoption:
- The number of automations deployed per customer is tripling year-over-year
- The number of systems connected per customer is doubling year-over-year
- Nearly 50% of our 70,000+ builders are outside of IT
- The data workloads are doubling every 4 months
- There are now over 400,000 community-built automations for reuse and sharing
Over the past year, we further consolidated our position in this market as the only product that is truly built for both IT and business and maintained our place as the only leader in Gartner and Forrester iPaaS reports that is modern and serverless.
Beyond the numbers, the significant growth in SaaS is fueling a major shift from IT to BT (Business Technology), which is all about driving business impact with speed and agility through apps, integrations, and automations. We are seeing a significant movement emerge around business systems. This community that makes digital transformation happen has become central to our mission.
All of this appears to us as the early stages of a major shift. A movement towards speed of innovation, efficiency, and of a collaborative IT+Business approach required to really unlock the scale of business transformation companies need to be leaders in their categories. A movement that is at the convergence of four of the fastest growing categories of enterprise software — Automation/RPA, iPaaS, collaboration products like Slack and MS Teams, and AI/ML.
Up ahead – putting the $70M to work for you, our customers
We could not have done any of this nor would we be in this position without the passion and support of our customers throughout. You have been frank and generous with your ideas and feedback. We are going to reinvest the new funding back into making Workato even more awesome for you. Here are five ways we are planning to do this:
1. Product: The funding will go right into accelerating our product roadmap and innovation. We have exciting plans across our platform: builder productivity, lifecycle and governance, as well as operations and administration for very large-scale enterprise-wide deployment, zero downtime deployments, connector marketplace, and more.
2. People: We are most proud of the fact that you have consistently rated us best for “ease of doing business with” based on the support you receive from our team.
We have heard from you how much value regular check-ins and ideation have. We plan to significantly grow our customer success management team to take partnership with you to a new level.
3. ‘Unlimited’ pricing: Besides the product and support, we realize how important pricing is to making your vision around enterprise-wide automation real. You need a pricing model that is customer-centered, super predictable, and is fair-use based. We were excited to take a big step towards this with the ‘Unlimited’ pricing model we launched last week. We will continue to invest in working with you to remove any further barriers to enterprise-wide adoption.
4. Ecosystems: Your world is best-of-breed. Integration and automation is a neutral technology that must work well with your entire app ecosystem. That’s why we have cultivated deep technology partnerships with the ‘key cloud hub’ providers like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Slack, MS Teams, Marketo, Zendesk, Snowflake, OutSystems, and more. We remain the only company that the top 3 SaaS companies, who have their own integration tools, have invested in together. Going forward, we will be investing a lot more in this area both from a technology and go-to-market standpoint to help you get the most out of your best-of-breed applications.
5. The Business Technology movement: We are strong believers in this trend and have been making big commitments to the Business Systems Community. With this round of funding, we are going to partner with you to further accelerate this movement.
Thank you!
We are incredibly grateful to our customers, team, partners and investors who have made Workato possible. With the additional resources we now have, we could not be more excited, committed and energized to supporting you and making you even more successful.
