Yet more investor capital is pouring into the business automation market as startup Tonkean Inc.today announced a $50 million round of funding today.

The Series B round was led by Accel and saw participation from Lightspeed Ventures, which led Tonkean’s $24 million Series A round in April 2020. Individual investors, including Atlassian Plc co-CEO Scott Farquhar, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and a number of executives from UiPath Inc., also participated in the round.

Founded in 2015, Tonkean sells a robotic automation platform that it pitches as an operating system for business operations. The highlight feature of its platform is its no-code process orchestration capability that enables users to orchestrate processes, coordinate people and connect systems across their organization without needing any coding skills.

Bypassing the need for developers is central to Tonkean’s platform, which the company says is preferable alternative to companies buying third-party systems, building their own or simply falling back to manual work.

The secret sauce behind Tonkean’s platform is its “Enterprise Components”, which are reusable, user-defined, monitored and managed components that help to orchestrate business processes across an organization. They give companies a more consistent standard for creating business processes and systems that work with their current tools and align with the way their employees work.

Tonkean co-founder and Chief Executive Sagi Eliyahu (pictured) told SiliconANGLE the ability to create software in the business world remains a privilege for the few, as only a tiny percentage of people have the skills needed to write code. He argues that the world needs more software makers, because software has become critical to how all businesses are run today. But the lack of coding skills leaves businesses with two unappealing options, he said.

“Business teams can buy an endless amount of SaaS applications to solve specific process challenges,” Eliyahu said. “However, this adds to complexity for the team that needs to manage it and for the employees that need to jump across multiple apps.”

The other option, he said, is to just do nothing and leave things in the hands of whatever developers the company does have on its staff. But that results in a huge backlog of projects because there’s never enough hands on deck, Eliyahu said.

“Both of these options stifle productivity and innovation, and they are one of the core reasons why enterprises are so inefficient,” he explained. “To solve this problem, enterprises must expand the pie of who can build and deliver software.”

Eliyahu reckons a host of companies are already doing just that with Tonkean’s platform. The likes of Instacart, Grubhub Inc. and Eversana Life Science Services, LLC are all using it to optimize and align operations across their sales, marketing, customer support, legal and finance teams, he said.

The CEO explained that Tonkean’s platform can fix many software-related issues. He said one of the most common problems for enterprises is managing the handoff between sales and legal teams, for example. Tonkean’s platform gives users an easy way to consolidate and automate legal requests received across multiple systems, without forcing workers to adopt any new systems or create new processes themselves.

“Other specific use cases can range from high-volume intake processes such as triaging, routing and coordinating support and legal requests to longstanding processes like monitoring account activity and legal contracts,” he said. “What’s important is that the solutions deployed by Tonkean work together with the tools already in place and actively reach out to people when needed.”

Eliyahu said Tonkean’s robotic automation platform builds upon more established robotic process automation software that has already been widely adopted by hundreds of enterprises. RPA helps enterprises automate routine tasks that normally mandate repetitive manual work by creating software robots to do them instead. “Tonkean builds on that by giving enterprises a way to easily define and manage the business logic that defines how processes are executed across all of their systems, people and tools,” he explained.

Looking ahead, Tonkean is planning to hire more people to expand its go-to-market teams in San Francisco and its engineering and product teams in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Accel Partner Miles Clements said he believes Tonkean’s platform has what it takes to change fundamentally how enterprise software is created, delivered and maintained. He said it will be similar to what Slack Technologies Inc. did for communications tools and what UiPath Inc. has done for RPA.

Photo: Tonkean