Alloy Automation Inc. today said that it has secured a $20 million early-stage investment led by Andreessen Horowitz to expand the feature set of its namesake cloud service, which helps e-commerce companies streamline their business operations.

Online retailers usually rely on multiple software tools to support their operations. An e-commerce company may use one application to process transactions, another to manage its customer loyalty program and a third to coordinate advertising campaigns. The larger the company, the more software tools it uses.

Many business tasks require a retailer’s workers to use multiple applications. Adding a new product listing, for example, might involve copying product data from the inventory management application to the online catalog management tool. Companies must either perform such tasks manually, or create automation workflows to manage them, which is often difficult for a retailer with limited in-house technical expertise. 

San Francisco-based Alloy Automation provides a service that enables e-commerce companies to create automation workflows without writing any code. The service allows a company to create integrations between its software tools through a drag and drop interface. From there, each integration can be customized to carry out a specific business task that would otherwise have to be done manually. 

A retailer’s finance team could create an integration that syncs the details of every new purchase to the spreadsheet it uses to calculate weekly revenues. The marketing department, meanwhile, can build a workflow that notifies customers when a new product becomes available.

Integrations created with the startup’s platform can be customized for different situations. For example, a workflow that notifies customers of a newly added product can be configured to only alert users who purchased similar items in the past. 

Some tasks, such as syncing sales logs between two different applications, may require changing the data format of the files being processed. Alloy Automation provides pre-packaged software building blocks to simplify data format modifications and other advanced tasks that an automation workflow may perform.  

To simplify development further, the startup offers a collection of ready-to-use workflows spanning areas such as marketing, inventory management and logistics.

“Whether a store owner wants to issue a refund based on a customer support ticket, send someone an incentive for being a loyal customer, or customize packaging before it’s shipped, Alloy makes it simple,” Andreessen Horowitz General Partner David Ulevitch wrote in a blog post. 

Alloy Automation’s service provides the ability to create automation workflows for more than 100 different applications. Using the new Series A funding, the startup intends to grow the number of applications that its service supports by expanding its partner ecosystem. Alloy Automation reportedly also plans to double its headcount to about 40 employees this year. 

Image: Alloy Automation