Four million for Cologne-based startup that automates annoying copy & paste work
Every person whose job primarily takes place on a computer knows those annoying tasks that have to be done over and over again. Every time you create a new customer profile, for example. Every time you copy the numbers from last month into the current table. Every time you have to fill out the registration form.
The Cologne-based startup Automaited wants to make all this annoying stuff disappear. With software that, firstly, uses AI to recognize recurring usage patterns and, secondly, automates these tasks. And all this without the need for a programmer. It's what they call "No Code."
Renowned investors believe in the concept: In April 2022, the software startup closed a seed round of four million euros. Leading the round is the Berlin-based venture capital firm Headline, which is also involved in companies like Sonos, Sorare, Bumble, and Gopuff. Additionally, the early-stage investor Northzone joined the round, and the existing investors Visionairies Club and the TechVision Fund also participated.
The bots do the dirty work
What Automaited does falls under the concept of Process Mining: The software delves deep into the processes within a company to identify areas where things could be done faster, better, and easier. Denis Golovin, CEO and one of the three founders, explains it in an interview with Gründerszene as follows: "We automate workflow steps by identifying patterns in work processes and generating bots in the background for these patterns." These can be very small things, such as the manual conversion of American date formats to German ones in an internationally operating company, in order to input data into Excel or SAP. It's what they call "monkeywork." This is where Automaited can take over.
Besides tangible patterns like addresses or dates, the Automaited Assistant can also learn a variety of abstract and generic patterns," Golovin continues. For example, it can recognize that the first letters of a serial number being processed by the user need to be transferred to a specific field in SAP, while all the remaining letters of the serial number must be copied to another field. "These abstract patterns are so numerous and variable that a human programmer could not economically represent them."
Specialization: Sales and Administration
At the beginning, the Cologne-based company focused on use cases in the sales and administration domains. There is a concentration of repetitive tasks, such as processing address data or managing customer information. "Due to the generality of these patterns, they occur in a variety of verticals and processes," says Golovin. "For example, in the case of municipal utilities, they are often found in departments dealing with invoice corrections, recording alternative bill recipients, or generally in the real estate industry."
He mentions the example of municipal utilities because the Stadtwerke Bonn (Bonn municipal utilities) are among the startup's first customers. People there often spend a significant amount of time transferring data from Excel spreadsheets to their ERP system (such as SAP), a task that other software providers, according to Automaited, have not yet automated.
Indeed, other startups have also tackled mundane office tasks: Berlin-based startup N8n, for instance, received half a million euros from Sequoia in the summer of 2020 for software designed to automate recurring tasks.
"By democratizing access to AI, we enable every employee to automate their repetitive workflows and focus on the most important aspects of their work," says Golovin. His startup contributes to increasing productivity for companies and continuously improving employee satisfaction. Up to twelve hours of mundane work per employee per month could be saved. The question then, of course, is what employees will do with the saved twelve hours.
