#38 Bubble's $100M funding. The current No-Code Hype. News Roundup for July 2021

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. In today's episode, we thought it would be really good to do a news roundup as the, the marketing intelligence automation, hyperautomation is moving so fast. And with everyone probably focusing on some, some key technologies, key vendors, we thought it would be really good to give everyone sort of a news roundup, what has happened over the last month or so, because there is lots of activity in the market, isn't it, Arno?

Yeah, of course. And I think we spoke about this earlier in our Clubhouse session, Sascha, is that there's a lot of automation startups out there. And, you know, they are gaining massive venture capitalist funding to obviously accelerate their product development and expand their go-to-market strategies. And obviously also try to penetrate the market deeper. You know, this week we obviously, we looked at Robocorp. We've talked about Robocorp. Which is of course an open-source software stack for robotic process automation. And, you know, they've raised a cool $21 million in the early stage round of funding to make process automation a lot more accessible. We have spoken about this open source in the last couple of weeks, and it's an interesting one to keep an eye on. Because, because of course with open source, the price point of the licenses, that's obviously affected. So it makes it a lot more accessible, right, to a lot more people. Is that a threat to the Microsoft offering? We always talk about that, how easily accessible Microsoft is. Maybe.

Yeah, maybe it is. Yeah, we will see. We see, and we will obviously report on this if we can see RoboCop is gaining even more momentum and there there will be lots of comparisons coming up in the market as well. I'm very sure about that. And maybe they will enter some of these quadrants. You might be following already the Forrester or the Gartner, the HFS Research, all those kind of analysts. Yeah, but RoboCop is definitely a big one and I haven't had it on my personal sort of radar either. So this is why it's really interesting and to see that that there's so much activity out there. The next one we, we talk about as well, a lot about workflow and case management solutions and low-code, no-code solutions in general anyway. And the next one I didn't have on my radar at all, um, is Tonkeen, and they raised a staggering $50 million to expand their no-code workflow automation platform. And Yeah, and I think everyone who is currently as a vendor and as a company looking at low-code and no-code, I guess with those new startups coming along, they find gaps in the market usually, which address topics which are not currently covered maybe by other products in the market. So it's definitely worth a look at. And yeah, yeah.

So yeah, I've checked out Tonkeen. So it is a pure no-code workflow automation platform. You know, it is a sort of a pure startup. The product itself looks pretty good. They promise no more code, no more apps, just straight to the point. They've got quite a big solution gallery. They focus on quite good solutions for verticals. So sales operations, for example, they look at sort of opportunity monitoring, lead qualification, pipeline cleanup, sales meeting scheduling, territory assignment, renewals coordination. So it's all of these modules that's of course just integrated with Salesforce as well. Slack. So, so it's all very sort of robust pluggable components, plugs into, to obviously Google as well, your Google Mail. And then of course they've got solutions for customer operations, you know, triage support, renewals coordinator, unified communications, email to chat notifications. So there's tons of modules in here which looks like it's, it's easy to, to plug into your workflow process. You know, of course, for other solutions, they, they also have options in legal operations, financial operations, IT, HR, business operations. So it's a very interesting offering, and it looks pretty robust. And the pricing, I'm unaware of at this particular point in time, but I suspect if you If you raise $50 million, you're doing something right. And I think, like I say, with the, with these new no-code workflow automation vendors and also the, the RPA vendors, the open-source ones, maybe they'll have their own quadrant soon, right? Just to differentiate them from the, I guess, the sort of the mainstream, mainstream ones.

Yeah. What every, every one of those applications we look at, the more modern ones, so the new upcoming ones, so they all seem to have a strong emphasis as well on connecting into sort of the existing apps in a company which are used very often. So like Slack, MS Teams, so everywhere where it comes to productivity and sort of make that sort of a standard. Yeah, so in some tools, more the enterprise tools we are working with, which have sort of a history 20 years back, and then they're catching up obviously with lots of the modern elements, but still they have the existing customer base, they have to sort of look at legacy stuff as well. So they have different things to consider. Sometimes they are not as fast as these new startups, so they can concentrate on the latest stuff without any baggage, which makes them really fast and very agile. Some of the companies you see on the quadrants, they are very mature, they're very, very strong, they have a huge partner network and you can rely on them. Heavily to get all stuff done. They have seen everything, all sorts of problems, but sometimes they're not, not the most innovative when you compare it. Yes, to, to, to these new companies coming up here. This is why, why you see these big investments here. And when we, we see a lot of investments are actually on the no-code side. We, we covered low-code for a couple of years now. It gets super popular. But no-code seems to be really the next big thing, and everyone seems to bet on it.

Yeah, that's true. And I think the interesting thing with, with these guys, it looks like they are moving away from per-user license. They, they are more about, you know, the number of modules you have in your apps and the number of integrations. And also the number of environments you've got.

Yeah, they want a very wide adoption, isn't it, throughout the business?

Yeah, exactly.

You're caring about that kind of stuff.

Exactly. So I think that they, they are, you know, in, in the game to actually make it quite accessible and not have a, I guess, a per-user license. It's, it's more on the actual modules that, you know, you, you are consuming. Um, and, um, yeah, I think it's definitely some, someone to, to look out for. Later on we'll talk about Bubble as well. Looks like Bubble is also a new one on the market, which is also a no-code provider. Also raised a bit of cash. Well, when I say a bit, I think it's $100 million. Yeah, but we'll cover Bubble as well. So there's a few other sort of newsworthy points. Obviously there's Avid Exchange that acquired FastPay, um, and, you know, that is all to do with, um, you know, automated payment technologies, um, that sort of services, um, middle market companies across America. Um, so, you know, that, that's an interesting acquisition as well, bringing their sort of value up to, to about $7 billion US at the minute. So I think that possibly what we're seeing is, is, is kind of, I guess, history repeating where, you know, some of the, the bigger players are, are sort of acquiring some of these innovative sort of smaller, smaller companies to, to bolster their offering.

Yeah, that's what you see in the market every, every couple of years. It feels like the, the cycles get, get shorter where we see a bigger consolidation. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's much faster anyway in the market. Um, And yeah, similar like the big, big acquisition from Zoom. Zoom obviously had tremendous success during the COVID pandemic. Everyone is using Zoom these days. Most meetings have moved over to Zoom, so MS Teams. And so they haven't done really lots of acquisitions, but they now announced a huge deal with the contact center market, which is more the enterprise focus. And where they had— anyway, Zoom had huge amount of growth in the enterprise market, and they acquired Five9, which really helps them to break into the contact center market and customer contact centers nowadays. So previously it was all telephone, and we probably see more and more of that kind of stuff, video-based And, uh, yeah, this is where probably makes sense to, to break into this enterprise market for Zoom. Uh, yeah, a huge acquisition and one of the big ones, definitely the bigger ones this year.

Yeah, and of course, they're just in the US alone, um, you know, the contact center market is, is worth around $24 billion US dollars, so it's big business. Um, so it would be interesting to see how many more businesses Zoom acquires to strengthen their foothold in the market. Another interesting one here is just people joining forces. So IBM, of course, they are behind IBM Watson, and they are joining forces with a company called Planeter. And Planeter is, if I pronounce this correct, they're all about making real-time decisions based on data with inside your business. So if data is fragmented and locked in silos, you know, they are the people that actually provides capabilities to, you know, unlock and liberate that data and, you know, integrate that into their operational processes. And, you know, it's all to do with decision-making, you know, You know, how do we ask or how do we get answers to very complicated questions very quickly by sort of looking at our data and pushing that in front of people who need it. So of course, with this partnership, you know, IBM Watson will be in the new offering as well. So that's certainly a very interesting one to look out for as well, what that, you know, that sort of partnership will bring, especially for, you know, for automation, for people using IBM Watson.

All right, next big one in the market: Ancork and Redox partner to streamline no-code healthcare applications. So we, we talked about this startup no-code vendors. So Uncork is one of those, which I wasn't aware a couple of months ago, and they, they completely as well no-code and Redox in, in the healthcare space. So it really makes sense to, to connect both sides of the technical expertise and the industry expertise to really get that market going. And I think in general we need to solve a lot of problems, isn't it? So lots of business problems. And no-code, not just in healthcare, it's important in every industry. Low-code, no-code can be, can be the answer to all these software development challenges out there. And Yeah, so there's a big one from, from Ancork and Redox to enable customers to, to really create applications and offer more seamless healthcare applications. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So sort of in other news as well, it seems like account payables automation is, is, is a topic of discussion. Now with the pandemic and the onset of COVID-19, it seems like a lot of people obviously were working from home. And, you know, we've, we've talked about accounts payable automation for a very long time, but the automated version of accounts payable just in the US alone is sort of worth $1.2 billion. And, you know, that's expected to sort of reach $3 to $3.5 billion by 2026. So there's a lot of opportunities inside accounts payable, it looks like, where, you know, automation is a key strategic priority for businesses to increase efficiency and productivity as well as their profitability. And, you know, I think one of the things that is a catalyst for this is really, I guess, the rise of smarter sort of automation solutions, you know, that's easily available, easily accessible. You know, we talked about, you know, the robotic process automation and the low-code automation, the traditional vendors. Obviously, there's a lot of startups coming into the market. There's a lot of commoditized AI where if you're dealing with accounts payable and you have to turn invoices into structured data points to pass them, you know, down the automation line. I think that all of these sort of new innovative sort of technologies enables this AP automation market to really grow. And I think there's definitely You know, all of the automation, like I said, is a key catalyst for it. Of course, there's also a strong driver to ensure that, you know, data is accurate and, you know, invoice processing costs are reduced, for example. Also, we see that there's a growing demand for sort of real-time mobile management of approval, you know, access to these invoices, because of course with the remote workforce, it's important that it's, you know, the people that needs to approve invoices needs to have that capability on their mobile phone. And so of course, with, you know, all of the mobile technologies out there, the automation in the back, you know, that's certainly a sort of a key catalyst that I see is also driving this accounts payable automation market. And of course, fraud detection, there's a lot of things that you could plug into models to highlight any fraud. You know, there's a surge of demand for payment integrations. So all of these kind of— these, these, these, these, these things are catalysts. And I think for accounts payable, it seems like it is such an obvious place to start in the business when you look at automation, right?

Yeah, and I guess some of that why it becomes more and more a topic again, it feels like accounts payable processes, workflow, and improvement has been around for so many times, for such a long time, and we have worked in so many different projects. So what— but it seems like now in industries, more than, than ever, because we had obviously COVID pandemic, some of the manufacturing and some of the healthcare industries and sectors, they, they immediately had this crazy growth. And with growth obviously comes, in this whole supply chain comes, you need faster order approval, faster processes to get really stuff done. So in healthcare, if you can't get your masks ordered within the next 30 minutes, you might have a problem. So if there are some weird approval steps and manual steps in the process, you can't work like that. So this is, and the same was with manufacturing. Suddenly we had everyone is at home, Everyone had to get everything delivered, so the whole manufacturing and supply chain and all that stuff related to it completely transformed within a couple of weeks. And with that, it still has to follow processes, and you still have to put an order through, you still have to pay an invoice, but these processes need to be accelerated, and it can only be achieved if it's high volume anyway. Yeah, that if that capability goes into companies for extracting data, unstructured data to structured data, to automate it in all the backend systems, to connect really seamless into ERP systems. So all that stuff became suddenly super important. And now we are here. Yes, with all this technology, it can help. It has helped. AI suddenly went into this, into this space. And yeah, there's huge, huge opportunity still. And it's interesting to see, it's, it's never, never, never a topic, accounts payable, which seems to go away.

Yeah, and it's, it's very, very topical at the minute. I think, like you said, it feels like accounts payable has been around for tens of years, you know, since automation was invented, everybody wanted to automate invoice processing. But I guess what you're saying, Sascha, is that there are some critical capabilities that is transforming that, you know, accounts payable automation value chain, you know, including document intelligence where, you know, we could now improve our visibility and flexibility to read any financial document in any format across multiple languages and also, you know, have really good workflows, either simple or complex approval and execution workflows, you know, with that drives these intelligent decision-making. Of course, you know, Electronic invoices, that's nothing new, but, you know, it's easy to build, you know, e-invoicing and portals for customers to go and download their invoices and/or to set up notifications so the invoices gets delivered to inbox or to their portal. Of course, there's really good ERP and cloud platform integration with the automation tools. So, you know, there's pre-built connectors And, you know, so these are all sort of key drivers that makes, I guess, the modern approach to AP, you know, really exciting and sort of just get to that sort of place where, you know, it does kind of get to a point where it's true sort of intelligent automation where it sort of lights off automation, the invoice comes in, we can process it. So of course we've got AI and machine learning, and that's, you know, a necessary feature for what I've just explained. Definitely something that's sort of newsworthy and touch again on.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's probably something we have a couple of episodes on in the future as well, similar like we had on HR automation. And yeah, Very, very certain actually. We will talk about API automation more in detail. And if you have questions on that topic specifically, reach out to Arno, myself, and we can, yeah, we can discuss any questions you might have on this one, or join our next Clubhouse session where we discuss all sorts of questions around the topic of AI and process and automation, not just AI, sorry. Yeah, and there's more, more news, isn't it, Arno? More, more, more development. You mentioned Bubble already.

Yeah, so Bubble is a no-code startup and they just raised $10 million— no, sorry, $100 million. Yeah, yes, so the numbers are staggering. So I think it was by Insight Partners and another private equity firm. So they've announced they're going to spend the money in sort of boot camps for students, make it accessible so students can start building Bubble applications. And, you know, the idea is that it is again a sort of a no-code platform. You can build you know, pretty much any type of app in it, sort of a web or mobile responsive app, and, you know, plug in some automation behind it. Of course, what you see in there is the usual. You've got sort of workflows, data, you know, your forms designer, so you could, you can customize your UX pretty significantly. You can manage your data and, you know, the accounts and who use the platform. You know, we talk about roles and responsibilities, who can log in, you know, that sort of thing. And, you know, it's pretty good. It supports things like, I don't know, you could drag and drop obviously form controls, video link or videos, maps, you can overlay that with some data, you know, you can have some sort of dynamic content with inside your apps. So, you know, fairly robust, it's all cloud-based as well. And I think, you know, it's again one of those sort of funky startups that, you know, just puts another sort of angle for somebody to look at. You know, it's free for one person if you want to subscribe to it. And, you know, again, it's a very, very, very good price point. It looks pretty easy to use.

So I think the big advantage they have is they picked a very unique target market. So they, we would discuss on this topic a couple of times on innovation and ideation within the business. How can a business come just experiment with, with a low-code or no-code platform to, to solve small or medium or big, big company problems and just playing around with ideas and putting stuff together in sort of a couple of days or weeks instead of like months like with, like we had with previous technologies. And there was Bubble, they, they also addressed the startup market. So they basically say, here, Mr. Entrepreneur, you have a startup idea, that's great, but you have just a business background, you're not a coder. What are you doing? Do you find— can you find a coder who helps you on your startup, or you're just validating your idea, validating your innovation? So they go to them, do you have a coder? No? Then get started here and build something, maybe the next Airbnb or the next Twitter. So this is sort of their, their promise, so that, that the entrepreneur can build these really powerful web applications without actually needing a coder. And that's super attractive from, from in that market. And I guess, but that still applies to businesses, normal enterprises anyway, because there's even a, there's even a sort of a movement that within companies some, some people should think like entrepreneurs and come up with good business ideas to take things forward. Yeah, and this, this will be the application for them, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. This is a perfect place also to prototype ideas and to quickly spin up, like you say, if you, if you're entrepreneur and you've got an idea and you want to test the market out you know, even if it's not something that's functional, but just visually appealing, it's a very, very, very good place to start to create that user journey and to explain how that would look like. And of course, you know, they've got a marketplace as well. So, you know, there's out of the box loads of templates you could download and plug into your solution straight away, you know, from project management, um, you know, dashboards, um, you know, this mobile phone, um, application design templates you could bring in. Um, so, you know, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of plugins as well. Of course, you know, with Box, Figma, Google Maps, Facebook, Mailchimp, um, you know, uh, obviously seamless sign-in with, with Google. For example. So, you know, a lot of, a lot of sort of integration capabilities as well. And, you know, a lot of plugins, APIs, API connectors. And then also there's a marketplace where there's an ecosystem of, you know, consultancies and agencies that you could either get some professional services from, or you could download their templates and, uh, you know, have a play and, and see if, if that's the sort of thing that, that will solve your problem. This is all kind of just stitching together these no-code apps now in a very rapid fashion. And of course, with, with somebody like Bubble, they, um, you know, they want to empower the masses, they want to get everybody on it, um, and like to say, they want to teach students and anybody learning sort of want for learning or desire for learning to use the platform.

This is the right thinking. So with the future, with tomorrow's problems, we can only solve with the right tech talent, which we're trying to make today. So this is really needed. So when you look at the digital transformation forecasts and the intelligent automation or automation in general, it is sort of like, it looks a little bit like the COVID exponential curve. It goes hockey stick-like, um, up over the next couple of years, 5 to 10 years. You will see. So now you think we are fast? No, it will be much faster. And yeah, we don't currently— we don't have that talent. We don't have enough coders. We don't have enough people with the right mindset. Digital solutions and students, it's definitely the right place to, to start with. To really get the developers, the tech talent of tomorrow enabled on those really good technologies.

Well, we've seen it firsthand in our company because we've got a student work experience program and we had a 17-year-old student that's currently doing his sort of final year at secondary school. We provided him 5 days of training on a low-code platform. And we gave him an assignment to build an automated insurance claims management system. Not comprehensive, but, you know, meaningful where insurance claim can be logged, it can be processed through sort of various teams, various people. It's all workflow driven. It's all low-code forms and no-code forms. And it was incredible to see this sort of enthusiasm, you know, once, you know, this individual understood what low and no-code is all about, how we pushed the boundaries. And we were stunned by what he can achieve within 5 days. And, you know, that's sort of what you're talking about, this sort of this new generation of, you know, sort of coders that is not necessarily people that's gonna write, you know, C++ in a basement somewhere, pizza and drinking Coke and never seeing the sunlight. You know, it is sort of progressive thinking people that understand, you know, what good software feels like. And let's, you know, let's give those rapid development tools for them to express themselves rather than you know, sort of going down this path where results is only seen in a very long period of time because you have to code everything by hand. So I think that just kind of backs that point up, and I think it is a valid thing that in the future I think that we will probably see when the kind of the new enthusiastic generation comes back, uh, people sort of used to the way of working where everything is instant, everything's fast, everything is sort of just, you know, accessible. So that mindset will sort of come into the software as well and the way we create the software.

Yeah, at the end of the day, it really matters that we can solve problems, isn't it? Solve business problems and solve them fast because very often when things happen, we can't wait for months. And this is, this is where, where all these solutions are, are really good. So we get really fast results. It doesn't need to— sure, we need to understand what's sort of behind sometimes the black box of these platforms, need to understand it for like data privacy reasons and compliance and that kind of stuff. But generally what matters is that we solve that problem. So 12 months ago, 18 months ago, we had the problem, we had to immediately switch working from home remote. So you can't wait for solutions for, for months, uh, you need something now. Um, it doesn't really— and it doesn't need to be perfect. Sometimes it just needs to work 80%, uh, better, better fast than 100% and never.

Yes.

Yeah.

And it's true. And I think it, I think it just opens up the market more for solutions. I mean, it's interesting you touch on the point about People are just interested in solving problems. And yeah, of course, there's always going to be, you know, Objective-C++ developers out there. That's their interest, that's what they're interested in, and they want to optimize algorithms, algorithms that does a specific thing. And I think what we're talking about here is just kind of broadening the scope for people to get involved where you would have otherwise might have lost that talent, um, because that particular person is not really interested in coding, but what they are interested in is creating solutions where without really doing the coding. And this is such a good platform to do that, this paradigm of low and no-code. So just moving it on slightly on the news. So recently also Blue Prism, which is of course an RPA vendor, they've partnered with Alteryx. Alteryx is of course a company that that provides a platform that you could automate sort of data flows with inside Excel. So if you've got any spreadsheet processing, heavy-duty spreadsheet processing inside your business, Alteryx is a very, very strong platform that you could basically extract, transform, and load data from various spreadsheets in an industrial scale, you know, throughout your business. So, you know, this, this, this partnership, Blue Prism says, will obviously enable their customers to automate faster and also to, to provide more reliable critical data and insights. Of course, you know, all of us wants to work with inside spreadsheets every day, but I think that is the reality of the world we work in. You know, spreadsheets is probably never going to go away. And of course, Alpatrix, what they do is they provide a solution for processing of data very eloquently, actually. And like I say, on a sort of industrial scale. And it would be interesting to see how this partnership develops with them and Blue Prism and, you know, how, how the product of that partnership would allow sort of for more RPA solutions to be built on top of what is essentially Excel data sources, right?

All right, so next big one we have on the list is Nintex launched AI-based capabilities and integrations within the Nintex Workflow Cloud, and that allows users to manage and automate and optimize processes more effectively and workflows more effectively. So, yeah, Nintex is really pushing, pushing a lot on, isn't it?

Yeah, I think Nintex is also recognizing that, you know, to be in, in this space, you obviously need to enhance your AI capabilities. This might be a sort of direct I guess, feature parity that they want to achieve with the likes of Microsoft Power Automate, for example. I would expect that the AI capabilities will be, you know, sort of commoditized modules, you know, the same thing that sort of Microsoft will have in terms of, you know, pattern recognition, extraction of unstructured data, Of course, Nintex already got very powerful document generation capabilities. So I think this was this really interesting thing to see how the Nintex AI capabilities develop further. Nintex also got a very, very, what they call a process-first approach to automation. Of course, Dave, we've spoken in our previous podcasts about, you know, process mapping and ideation discovery. Nantix has got a very, very eloquent tool called the ProMap that you could map out processes. And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if the AI sort of capabilities of Nantix would sort of penetrate deeper into that space as well, even touching slightly on process mining. Now whether or not they will also acquire a process mining company is up for discussion, but sort of looking at Nintex's track record for, I guess, the last sort of 5 or 6 years and the acquisitions they've made, more recently the acquisition of K2, they're definitely in the market for acquiring or growth by acquisition. So perhaps, you know, we'll see more of that in the future as well.

Great. I guess we, we, we are nearly finished, isn't it? Was our, was our news, plenty of news obviously to go through, and there's, there has been good movement over the last couple of weeks. So on the intelligent automation and space and into intelligent document processing space, you probably heard of about Eversoft. So this is so that they have a new update as well. So to really eliminate document automation challenges within businesses, so they get even more stuff done than they had in the previous version. So for everyone who is a big fan of FSOF, which has lots of APIs available, to extract data. So yeah, that's the big update from them. So check it out. Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, very, very broad news update. So hopefully we've covered a broad range of sort of news stories in this first roundup, and we obviously look forward to providing you know, future roundups as well in the intelligent automation space. I think it is, it's going to be an exciting sort of end of summer, autumn, when some of the networking events, uh, starts to, to rekindle and start to kick off again. Lots to talk about, obviously lots, lots to cover, and a lot of players to, to, to, to have a look at and keep your eye on. And of course, you know, we'll provide updates on the movers and the shakers and what's news, you know, regularly on the podcast as well. And yeah, hopefully that will be a good sort of addition to everybody listening to our podcast. And, you know, thanks to all our loyal listeners. We had some tremendous responses from everybody, a lot of submissions on topics. And one was to do a news roundup. So we will keep it going. We'll ensure that we try and touch all of the, you know, the talking points in automation. And, you know, keep the suggestions rolling in. It's much appreciated.

Unfortunately, that's it again. With this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!