Enterprise automation company Workato Inc. today announced its second big raise of the year, closing on a $200 million round of funding that brings its total amount of capital raised to $420 million.

Battery Ventures led the Series E round with equal participation from Insight Partners, Altimeter Capital and Tiger Global. Others, including Geodesic Capital and Redpoint Ventures also participated. As a result of today’s round, which follows a $110 million Series D round in January, Workato is now valued at $5.7 billion.

Workato said today’s investment underscores the urgent need to automate workflows as businesses strive to increase their agility and efficiency and innovate against a backdrop of coronavirus pandemic-induced digital transformation.

Traditionally, companies have had to deploy multiple integration and automation tools to optimize processes at the data, process, application programming interface and user interface levels. Doing so is time-consuming and extremely inefficient. Workato aims to make its automation platform the tonic for many businesses. Its software is designed to automate business workflows across many cloud-based and on-premises applications.

Key to Workato’s platform is its “recipes” for common business processes that can be created just once and shared across multiple users within an organization or even the entire Workato community, so they can be reused again. The recipes are a set of steps that Workato will follow to get work done between various apps. They can have advanced features that allow them to handle all app integration and workflow automation scenarios, including complex data transformations, conditional triggers and actions, duplicate detection and more.

Sharing recipes can therefore be mutually beneficial, and the more customers use Workato, the more recipes are created, increasing the platform’s utility.

Workato co-founder and Chief Executive Vijay Tella says his company has grown because many businesses struggle to achieve digital transformation. He said many find that other integration and robotic process automation tools struggle to scale.

Tella may have a point, because Workato has grown fast. The company claims more than 11,000 customers now use its platform, helping it double its annual recurring revenue over the last year. New customers added in the last year include Nokia Corp., Stitch Fix Inc., GitLab Inc. and Lucid Group Inc.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that integration has become critical for the digital economy and all the more so in pandemic times, with enterprises rapidly changing their digital footprints, triggering more integration work than ever before.

“Workato has been at the forefront of integration innovation for years, so it is good to see the vendor getting another round,” Mueller said. “Let’s hope it will keep pushing the needle towards better integration, which is the foundation of what matters to today – enterprise acceleration towards faster and more agile processes.”

Workato said it will use today’s funding to accelerate its product roadmap. One of its key projects will be the “10,000 Connector Initiative” launched today. The initiative follows Workato’s acquisition earlier this year of RailsData Software Pvt Ltd., which specializes in application, database and device connectivity using APIs. The company aims to connect thousands of different applications and platforms in the coming months.

Workato will also look to accelerate its expansion into the U.S., Europe, Middle East and Africa and Asia-Pacific markets.

Image: Workato