Ramping Up Global Growth Amidst Fast-Changing Automation Trends

 By Guanchun Wang, Chairman and CEO of Laiye, and Ronen Lamdan, CEO International of Laiye

 
Making the ‘new normal’ work is key to future success. Massive disruptions and changing business models in the post-pandemic era have forced enterprises to implement work-from-home policies and adopt more automation solutions to improve operational efficiency and minimize human work processes. As such, the industry supporting a high-performing digital workforce is seeing exponential growth, with Gartner projecting that process-agnostic software tools such as RPA, AI, IDP, Chatbots and Process Mining supporting the Intelligent Automation market will hit a valuation of $46 billion in 2025 with a CAGR of 18.8%.

 Accelerating technology adoption and solid economic growth in China and India will see Asia Pacific achieve the second-highest CAGR in the IA market from 2022 to 2027. Other growth drivers are the increased rate of globalization and digitalization and the growing presence of Intelligent Automation (IA) providers.

 As digital transformation sweeps through the world’s enterprises, Laiye has set about solving some of the toughest digital transformation challenges related to RPA and AI so the world’s fastest-growing businesses can operate more smoothly and efficiently, freeing up their staff for more value-additive work. 

 We have further strengthened our place as a leader in the fast-evolving IA market, and now we are taking steps to bring even more significant growth on a global scale. We've recently acquired the leading European enterprise conversational AI platform, Mindsay, and completed our $160 million Series C funding round. In this article, we'd like to discuss these exciting developments in more detail.

 Our success and differentiated approach to automation has caught the attention of top investors, with significant interest in our latest funding round from investors who wanted to join us on our journey to reach our long-term vision. As a result, we recently announced the completion of our $160 million Series C funding round with the latest tranche at $70 million jointly led by high-growth enterprise technology-focused private equity firms, including lead investor HOPU Magnolia, and co-leads Youshan Capital and VMS Group. Existing shareholders Lightspeed China Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in this round.

 This new round of funding will continue to fuel our relentless product innovation and triple-digit revenue growth in the years to come. We plan to deploy the new capital to accelerate expansion in Asia Pacific, the Americas and EMEA, and capitalize on the rapid growth of the IA market. This presents a significant growth opportunity for us, especially as highly scaled automation deployments remain rare. According to Harvard Business Review, most organizations still implement automation in a piecemeal approach rather than integrating processes into workflows. This will change as enterprises start recognizing the value of implementing end-to-end IA solutions across business functions to transform their business and gain a competitive advantage. 

 This funding round comes on the back of our acquisition of Paris-based Mindsay and establishing a new R&D hub in Paris. 

 Acquiring Mindsay adds to Laiye’s conversational AI capabilities and complements our existing product offering perfectly, advancing our goal of becoming the leading provider of Intelligent Automation software worldwide. It gives our clients a powerful, low-code and no-code platform to automate both customer-facing and employee-facing interactions. According to Gartner's predictions, 80% of technology products and services will be built by non-IT experts by 2024. This will help remove silos between the IT and other business departments, "enabling the democratization of technology development beyond IT professionals."

 A significant advantage of Mindsay’s solution is its simplicity – business specialists can configure the tech quickly and plug it into the company’s existing customer service and CRM tools. And for added usefulness, Mindsay’s technology supports more complex transactional queries, not merely simple informational services. 

 When you combine Mindsay’s solution with Laiye’s RPA offering to streamline repetitive workflows and a conversational interface that understands human language, companies gain a cutting-edge platform to digitize and automate critical parts of their business processes. This is crucial to creating the Frictionless Enterprise of the future, where industrial-era firms structured around paper-based legacies are fast becoming a thing of the past.

 To learn more about our Mindsay acquisition, check out our video featuring Laiye’s International CEO, Ronen Lamdan and Guillaume Laporte, CEO and Co-Founder of Mindsay.

 Besides crossing these huge milestones, over the past year, we have also more than doubled our team outside China to 100+ employees, about 15 percent of the total workforce, grew our partner network to 600+ strong and fostered one of the world’s largest Intelligent Automation developer communities of more than 600,000 registered users globally.

Laiye aims to use the power of IA to transform, empower, and make all organizations and their people better. We will achieve this vision by eliminating more pain points for consumers, unleashing higher productivity for companies, and boosting job satisfaction for employees. The net result gives our global customers a competitive edge and more excellent opportunities to scale successfully.