Open-source automation software company Camunda Services GmbH said today it has raised €82 million (about $100 million) in a new round of funding.

Private equity firm Insight Partners led the Series B round, with participation from existing investors Highland Europe. Camunda is an emerging player in the red-hot robotic process automation market that involves using software robots to observe workflows in common business applications and then deduce ways to automate repetitive tasks for workers.

The robots are used to monitor worker’s individual keystrokes as they interact with customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and similar tools. Then, they try to identify repetitive patterns and come up with ways of automating them.

Eliminating a few keystrokes might seem trivial, but the savings can be quite considerable when they’re applied to hundreds or thousands of users over long periods of time. RPA provides other benefits too, such as reducing errors that are common when tasks are performed manually.

Camunda is fairly unique in the RPA market in that its platform is based on an open-source architecture that enables enterprises to design, orchestrate, monitor and analyze their robots. In effect, Camunda’s software introduces a lifecycle based approach to business process automation that enables firms to create and orchestrate whatever RPA tools they need and migrate them to more robust application programming interfaces that can scale as required.

The company does this because it says that most of the RPA bots used in the enterprise today are “fragmented and fragile,” citing a 2020 survey of process automation professionals that found 90% of them admit to facing challenges with their deployments. Camunda says the problem is that enterprises have introduced too many RPA bots into their information technology environments. That has led to an overwhelming level of complexity and technical debt that many organizations cannot overcome, Camunda says.

Camunda’s platform helps overcome those problems by enabling companies to monitor, alert and analyze RPA bot activity centrally across their entire organization. They can then orchestrate multiple RPA bots and their activities to get more value from them, and replace those bots with modern APIs and microservices to reduce technical debt.

Camunda says its approach has proven popular, with big enterprises such as Allianz SE, Intuit Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc, all cited as customers. The company claims to have enjoyed its best-ever year in 2020 too, despite the global market challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, though it didn’t provide absolute revenue numbers.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Jakob Freund said today’s funding round underscores the tremendous value that the company’s RPA software provides for its customers. “It also shows the huge global market opportunity that is in front of Camunda as demand for open, cloud-native process automation solutions that can orchestrate processes end-to-end is quickly reshaping the market,” he said.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE that today we live in an era of best practices uncertainty that has been triggered by the availability of infinite computing.

“Therefore enterprises are desperate for tools that help their developers and tech savvy business users take charge of their automation destiny, and this is where vendors like Camunda come in,” Mueller said. “It’s good to see more funding in the space.”

Image: iuriimotov/freepik