In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 489th 1Mby1M Roundtable June 11, 2020: With Vincent Diallo, Interlace Ventures

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

After a pretty busy week on the show we’re here with our regular Friday episode, which means lots of venture rounds and new venture capital funds to dig into. Thankfully we had our full contingent on hand: Danny “Well, you see” Crichton, Natasha “Talk to me post-pandemic” Mascarenhas, Alex “Very shouty” Wilhelm and, behind the scenes, Chris “The Dad” Gates.

Make sure to check out our IPO-focused Equity Shot from earlier this week if you haven’t yet, and let’s get into today’s topics:

Instacart raises $225 million. This round, not unexpected, values the on-demand grocery delivery startup at $13.7 billion — a huge sum, and one that should make it harder for the well-known company to sell itself to anyone but the public markets. Regardless, COVID-19 gave this company a huge updraft, and it capitalized on it.Pando raises $8.5 million. We often cover rounds on Equity that are a little obvious. SaaS, that sort of thing. Pando is not that. Instead, it’s a company that wants to let small groups of individual pool their upside and allow for more equal outcomes in an economy that rewards outsized success.Ethena raises $2 million. Anti-harassment software is about as much fun as the dentist today, but perhaps that doesn’t have to be the case. Natasha talked us through the company, and its pricing. I’m pretty bullish on Ethena, frankly. Homebrew, Village Global and GSV took part in the financing event.Vendr raises $4 million. Vendr wants to help companies cut their SaaS bills, through its own SaaS-esque product. I tried to explain this, but may have butchered it a bit. It’s cool, I promise.Facebook is getting into the CVC game. This should not be a surprise, but we were also not sure who was going to want Facebook money.And, finally, Collab Capital is raising a $50 million fund to invest in Black founders. Per our reporting, the company is on track to close on $10 million in August. How fast the fund can close its full target is something we’re going to keep an eye on, considering it might get a lot harder a lot sooner. 

And that is that; thanks for lending us your ears.

The global lockdown conditions have resulted in organizations stepping up their spending on cyber security solutions. Enterprise cloud security company Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) is benefiting from this...

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Sramana Mitra: What is the level of adoption and penetration into this particular marketplace? How big is the market? How many kinds in that age group are there in America? What percentage of that...

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Byta, the music sharing service for pre-releases and other use cases where there is a need to share sound files privately, has picked up around $1.4 million in seed funding.

The round was led by the Canada Media Fund, with participation from of private investors. They include musician Scott Kannberg, one of the original members of 90s indie rock band Pavement, whom I’m told discovered Byta as a user of the service.

Launched as an MVP in 2015, today Byta describes itself as “the platform for music before it’s on streaming services.” The service lets anyone send and receive digital audio in a “clean, simple and secure way,” and is said to be used by bedroom artists to large record companies for sharing music files during the pre-release process and for collaboration, such as with bandmates, labels, promoters, writers and DJs, etc.

“Throughout the music ecosystem, everyone is privately sharing audio files and streams, long before tracks and albums are released on streaming services and pressed to vinyl,” explains Byta co-founder and CEO Marc Brown, who has worked in the music industry for 25 years.

“An artist’s music is their currency, and when recipients are not able to listen effortlessly, they will move on. The more time that is taken up by technical delays, the less time there is for listening. Though hard to believe, these simple tasks are difficult to accomplish efficiently on a desktop, and virtually impossible on mobile. Byta enables anyone in the music ecosystem to send and receive digital music in a clean, simple and secure way, on desktop and on mobile.”

With regards to use cases, Brown says producers and artists of all sizes use Byta to quickly swap tracks in the studio, and that managers and larger labels use the platform to securely share high-profile releases with key contacts across the music industry. “Byta is music’s first vertical SaaS, meaning our market is the whole music ecosystem,” he says.

To that end, Byta is competing most directly with generic file-sharing services, such as WeTransfer and Dropbox, along with artist streaming platforms like Soundcloud.

Adds the Byta CEO: “Unlike our competitors, Byta is built specifically for music. Byta is the only platform which takes advantage of audio files unique properties: embedded metadata, audio quality and streamability.”

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Vincent Diallo, Managing Partner at Interlace Ventures, a fund focused on Retail Tech. Yotta SecureAs for entrepreneur pitches, first up was Sunil...

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Asynchronous chat apps like Slack have done their best to kill email, but maybe the key to chat replacing email is just making email look like chat? That’s the idea of Spike, a productivity startup that has built an email app that organizes emails into chat bubbles with an interface that encourages users to keep it short and simple.

Spike’s software began with a focus solely on re-skinning the email experience, but today they’re also launching support for collaborative notes and tasks into their interface as they look to provide a cohesive solution for productivity. The company is fitting an awful lot of functionality into one window, but they hope that streamlining these apps together can leave users spending less time tabbing through separate windows and more time getting stuff done.

“Email is a collection of your tasks, so why should it be separated from where your other tasks are?” asks CEO Dvir Ben-Aroya.

The new functionality widens the ambitions of the software but also refocuses the app on a more complete business use case. Ben-Aroya admits that the company hasn’t pushed monetization very hard in the past, instead looking to scale up its base of free users in an effort to eventually scale up inside organizations. As the app looks to bring small businesses and larger enterprises onboard, the app is keeping its free tier, but to get past limits on message history and note/task creation users are going to have to upgrade to a $7.99 per month per user plan ($5.99 per month when billed annually).

Alongside its product news, the startup also shared today that it has raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners . Wix, NFX and Koa Labs also participated in the round. The company plans to use the cash to aggressively scale hiring and double its team this year.

“[W]e see a massive addressable market for centralized communication hubs to connect disparate messaging channels,” Insight Partners VP Daniel Aronovitz said in a statement. “The current climate and associated macro-tailwinds behind remote teamwork have only strengthened our belief that there is a sizable and growing demand for digital collaboration tools.”

The company’s platform is compatible with most email services and the app is available on Android, iOS, Mac and Windows.

Email startups are often privy to some of a user’s most sensitive data and can receive a lot of inquiries regarding privacy. As a result, Ben-Aroya believes his company is far ahead of competitors when it comes to safety. “Unlike many other available email clients, we’re never touching, manipulating, using, reusing or selling any part of the user data,” he says.

Spike has raised $16 million in funding to date.

Companies increasingly recognize that one of the greatest stresses for their employees is financial wellness. Even at innovative tech startups, people typically bump up against the limits of how much they know about wealth management pretty fast.

But providing financial education to a workforce, which has become increasingly common, is largely useless as most employees will tell you. The information can be hard to navigate, and it’s often not personalized in a way that addresses an employee’s circumstance and goals, which change over time depending on whether they are a recent graduate, getting married or even eyeing retirement.

It’s why so many employed people look to outside apps to both better understand their financial picture and to actually manage it.

It’s also a missed opportunity, according to a growing number of founders who are working to convince employers to move beyond education and instead offer automated financial planning (with a dash of human involvement) as an employee perk.

Their understandable argument: While offering benefits around fertility, family planning, and mental health are wonderful, companies are missing out on the chance to address the very top priority for their employees, which is how to avoid financial trouble.

Origin, a year-old San Francisco-based company led by Matt Watson — whose last company was acquired in December — is among the newest entrants to make the case.

Freshly backed by $12 million in funding led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Founders Fund and early Stripe employee Lachy Groom, among others, Origin wants to become the place where employees can track financial milestones, get professional advice from licensed financial planners, and take action, whether it be paying down student debt, building emergency savings or finding the right home and automotive insurance.

Currently staffed by 32 employees, six are financial planners, and they can handle the unique circumstances of “mid thousands of people,” says Watson, who notes that after an employee initially sets up a plan, much can be automated until a life event changes the picture.

“If you use just the tech, you’re only getting limited information,” he says, adding that access to Origin’s planners is “unlimited.”

The company already has 15 customers with between 250 and 5,000 employees, including the social network NextDoor; the cloud communications and collaboration software platform Fuze; and Therabody, whose Theragun therapy tool is used by pro athletes and trainers to pulverize their aching muscles.

All are paying $6 per employee per month because it doesn’t matter how much employees are making, says Watson. “The thing about financial stress is that it impacts everyone pretty evenly. The greater your income, the more stuff you buy.”

Considering that employees spend an estimated two to four hours each week dealing with their personal finances, an offering like Origin’s seems like a no-brainer for employers looking to both improve employee productivity and employee retention.

Indeed, the only thing holding back such offerings earlier in time were the kind of open banking APIs that exist today.

Now, the biggest challenge for Origin is to capture employers’ attention ahead of the competition. For example, another startup that’s also developing financial planning services as an employee perk is Northstar, founded by Red Swan Ventures investor Will Peng. More established players like Betterment that have long catered to individual investors are also focusing more on building up ties to employers that can use their offerings as an employee resource.

Either way, the trend is a positive one for employees, who are right now living through an economic roller coaster and could more generally use a lot more help with both staying afloat and saving for the future.

“Everyone struggles with finances,” says Watson, who worked in high-yield credit trading at Citi in New York before moving to San Francisco to start his last company. “I’m supposed to understand this stuff, and it’s complicated for me.”

Traditionally, measuring business success requires a greater understanding of your company’s go-to-market lifecycle, how customers engage with your product and the macro-dynamics of your market. But in the most challenging environment in decades, those metrics are out the window.

Enterprise application and SaaS companies are changing their approach to measuring performance and preparing to grow when the economy begins to recover. While there are no blanket rules or guidance that applies to every business, company leaders need to focus on a few critical metrics to understand their performance and maximize their opportunities. This includes understanding their burn rate, the overall real market opportunity, how much cash they have on hand and their access to capital. Analyzing the health of the company through these lenses will help leaders make the right decisions on how to move forward.

Play the game with the hand you were dealt. Earlier this year, our company closed a $40 million Series C round of funding, which left us in a strong cash position as we entered the market slowdown in March. Nonetheless, as the impact of COVID-19 became apparent, one of our board members suggested that we quickly develop a business plan that assumed we were running out of money. This would enable us to get on top of the tough decisions we might need to make on our resource allocation and the size of our staff.

While I understood the logic of his exercise, it is important that companies develop and execute against plans that reflect their actual situation. The reality is, we did raise the money, so we revised our plan to balance ultra-conservative forecasting (and as a trained accountant, this is no stretch for me!) with new ideas for how to best utilize our resources based on the market situation.

Burn rate matters, but not at the expense of your culture and your talent. For most companies, talent is both their most important resource and their largest expense. Therefore, it’s usually the first area that goes under the knife in order to reduce the monthly spend and optimize efficiency. Fortunately, heading into the pandemic, we had not yet ramped up hiring to support our rapid growth, so were spared from having to make enormously difficult decisions. We knew, however, that we would not hit our 2020 forecast, which required us to make new projections and reevaluate how we were deploying our talent.

Boston’s tech boom has led to a huge need for tech-related talent. But while the last decade has brought nearly 72,000 new tech jobs to Massachusetts, the growth brought with it slim progress regarding the makeup of who actually fills those roles. (Spoiler: It’s largely white men.)

According to MassTLC, it will take until 2085 for Black workers to reach the same hiring rate of white men in the industry today. For Latinos, it will take until 2045. And for women, it will take until 2070.

In this month’s Boston column, we decided to check in on the region’s diversity efforts. Boston is a city that has been defined both by a historically racist reputation and its university-driven liberal bonafides. As companies across the country have reacted to systemic racism with promises to do better when it comes to hiring, we wondered: Is Boston stepping up to the plate when it comes to hiring underrepresented candidates?

Using a list generated by a simple, time-bounded Crunchbase search for most recent Boston-area fundraising events. we turned to 15 companies that have recently raised within Boston and asked about their diversity efforts:

Ginkgo BioworksWasabi TechnologiesOrbita AIAtea PharmaceuticalsAmwellHemistaLifePod SolutionsJellyfishAllHere EducationCanvas GFXPIC TherapeuticsTyme Wear

Only a handful of companies responded, which wasn’t a good sign. Boston has a stunted record of releasing diversity data, so the silence was somewhat expected, if a little disappointing. Let’s review the responses we received to see what we can learn from both the answers (and the nonanswers).

At the end, we’ll look at some recent Boston venture data. We also have a new Boston investor survey coming later this month, so stay tuned.

The responses

As schools stay closed and summer camp seems more like a germscape than an escape, students are staying at home for the foreseeable future and have shifted learning to their living rooms. Now, Norwegian educational gaming company Kahoot — the popular platform with 1.3 billion active users and over 100 million games (most created by users themselves) — has raised a new round of funding of $28 million to keep up with demand.

The Oslo-based startup, which started to list some of its shares on Oslo’s Merkur Market in October 2019, raised the $28 million in a private placement, and said it also raised a further $62 million in secondary shares. While it’s not a privately held startup in the traditional sense — the Merkur Market is essentially like a stepping stone between being a fully private startup and a publicly-listed company, more explanation here — Kahoot still raises rounds from VCs and counts a number of them on its cap table. In this latest raise, the new equity investment included participation from Northzone, an existing backer of the startup that is a big name in Nordic investing, and CEO Eilert Hanoa.

At market close today, the company’s valuation on the Merkur was $1.39 billion (or 13.389 billion Norwegian krone).

Existing investors in the company include Disney and Microsoft, and the company has raised $110 million to date.

Kahoot launched in 2013 and got its start and picked up most of its traction in the world of education through its use in schools, where teachers have leaned on it as a way to provide more engaging content to students to complement more traditional (and often drier) curriculum-based lessons. Alongside that, the company has developed a lucrative line of online training for enterprise users as well.

The global health pandemic has changed all of that for Kahoot, as it has for many other companies that built models based on classroom use. In the last few months, the company has boosted its content for home learning, finding an audience of users who are parents and employers looking for ways to keep students and employees more engaged.

The company says that in the last 12 months it had active users in 200 countries, with more than 50% of K-12 students using Kahoot in a school year in that footprint. On top of that, it is also used in some 87% of “top 500” universities around the world, and that 97% of Fortune 500 companies are also using it, although it doesn’t discuss what kind of penetration it has in that segment.

It seems that the coronavirus outbreak has not impacted business as much as it has in some sectors. According to the midyear report it released earlier this week, Q2 revenue is expected to be $9 million, 290% growth compared to last year and 40% growth compared to the previous quarter, and for the full year 2020, it expects revenue between $32 million and $38 million, with a full IPO expected for 2021.

As it has been doing even prior to the coronavirus outbreak, Kahoot has also continued to invest in inorganic growth to fuel its expansion. In May, it acquired math app maker DragonBox for $18 million in cash and shares. The company also runs an accelerator, Kahoot Ignite, to spur more development on its platform.

However, Hanoa said that Kahoot is shifting its focus to now also work with more mature edtech businesses.

“When we started out, we were primarily receiving requests on early stage products,” he said. “Now we have the opportunity to consider mature services for either integration or corporation. It’s a different focus.”

Update: A previous version of this story said that DragonBox was acquired in March. It was acquired in May. The story has been updated to reflect this change. 

In both the private and public markets, valuations for B2B software companies continue to climb. The average publicly traded cloud company trades at nearly 12x forward revenue, while in the private markets, investors are considerably more aggressive. With record levels of private capital, continued outperformance in the public markets and a zero interest rate environment, it can be hard to imagine an impetus for slowing down this runaway software train (even the COVID-19 pandemic has not yet been successful!).

Yet, only four or five years ago, outsized exits in the enterprise sector were outliers. In 2016, we built the slide below (showing value at the time of IPO/acquisition) to demonstrate the dominance of large B2C exits. Back then, the 14 most significant venture-capital outcomes came from consumer companies, and the first enterprise outcome listed was LSI, a semiconductor company acquired for $6.5B in 2014.

Times have changed. In 2019 alone, seven enterprise exits would make this chart (Slack, Qualtrics, Datadog, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, 10x Genomics and Zoom). As I write this, 14 enterprise software businesses boast a market cap exceeding $20B.

To further illustrate this point, the two most valuable private venture-backed businesses (Stripe and SpaceX) are both enterprise businesses, and the top 25 most valuable companies are now nearly evenly split between consumer and enterprise. If this truly reflects the pipeline for the next generation of significant VC exits, we should expect the pendulum to continue to swing in favor of enterprise investing.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 490th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, June 18, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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As companies struggle to find ways to control costs in today’s economy, understanding what you are spending on SaaS tools is paramount. That’s precisely what early-stage startup Quolum is attempting to do, and today it announced a $2.75 million seed round.

Surge (a division of Sequoia Capital India) and Nexus Venture Partners led the round, with help from a dozen unnamed angel investors.

Company founder Indus Khaitan says that he launched the company last summer pre-COVID, when he recognized that companies were spending tons of money on SaaS subscriptions and he wanted to build a product to give greater visibility into that spending.

This tool is aimed at finance departments, which might not know about the utility of a specific SaaS tool like PagerDuty, but look at the bills every month. The idea is to give them data about usage as well as cost to make sure they aren’t paying for something they aren’t using.

“Our goal is to give finance a better set of tools, not just to put a dollar amount on [the subscription costs], but also the utilization, as in who’s using it, how much are they using it and is it effective? Do I need to know more about it? Those are the questions that we are helping finance answer,” Khaitan explained.

Eventually, he says he also wants to give that data directly to lines of business, but for starters he is focusing on finance. The product works by connecting to the billing or expense software to give insight into the costs of the services. It takes that data and combines it with usage data in a dashboard to give a single view of the SaaS spending in one place.

While Khaitan acknowledges there are other similar tools in the marketplace, such as Blissfully, Intello and others, he believes the problem is big enough for multiple vendors to do well. “Our differentiator is being end-to-end. We are not just looking at the dollars, or stopping at how many times you’ve logged in, but we’re going deep into consumption. So for every dollar that you’ve spent, how many units of that software you have consumed,” he said.

He says that he raised the money last fall and admits that it probably would have been tougher today, and he would have likely raised on a lower valuation.

Today the company consists of a six-person development team in Bangalore in India and Khaitan in the U.S. After the company generates some revenue he will be hiring a few people to help with marketing, sales and engineering.

When it comes to building a diverse company, he points out that he himself is an immigrant founder, and he sees the ability to work from anywhere, an idea amplified by COVID-19, helping result in a more diverse workforce. As he builds his company, and adds employees, he can hire people across the world, regardless of location.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and I’ve seen a few cycles. When we see discontinuities, every VC firm goes through a process of considering that discontinuity and...

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No business is immune to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve seen Airbnb — a company particularly susceptible to this black swan event — go through an insane design sprint. Even enterprise collaboration tools have felt it, with Box readjusting its product road map to focus on how the tool worked for remote employees.

InVision has also seen the change in its users behavior and adapted accordingly. Freehand, the company’s collaborative whiteboarding tool has seen a huge surge in users and the startup has added a handful of new features to the product.

The company says that Freehand is seeing 130% growth in weekly active users since March.

New features include sticky notes that come in multiple color, size and text options, as well as templates to give teams a jumping off point for their whiteboarding exercise. Freehand has six new templates to start — brainstorming, wireframing, retrospectives, standups, diagrams and ice breakers — with more to be added more soon.

InVision has also added a “presenting” mode to Freehand.

Because this virtual whiteboard has no space constraints, it can literally zoom out to infinity and is restricted only by the imagination of the team working on it. In “presenting” mode, a team leader can take over the view of the virtual whiteboard to guide their team through one part of the content at a time.

Freehand has an integration with Microsoft Teams and Slack, and also has a new shortcut where users can type “freehand.new” into any browser to start on a fresh whiteboard.

Interestingly, the user growth around Freehand doesn’t just come from the usual suspects of design, product and engineering teams. Departments across organizations, including HR, marketing and IT teams, are coming to Freehand to collaborate on projects and tasks. More than 60 percent of Freehand users are not coming from the design team.

InVision has also added some fine-tuning features, such as a brand new toolbar to allow for easier drawing of shapes, alignment, color and opacity features, and better controls for turning lines into precise arrows or end-points for diagrams.

One of the most interesting things about Freehand is that it allows for democratized access to the whiteboard itself. With no restraints on time or space, and with no one gatekeeping up at the front of the room holding the marker, all members of a team can go in and add their thoughts and ideas to the whiteboard before, during or after a meeting.

“One of the nice things about a whiteboard or a virtual whiteboard like this one is it removes the aspects of the restrictions of time and space, so teams can have more efficient meetings where they get the benefit of democratic input without the cost of having only one person at a time being able to speak or add,” said David Fraga, InVision President. “It offers a synchronous collision of collaboration.”

InVision has raised a total of $350 million from investors like FirstMark, Spark, Battery, Accel and Tiger Global Management. The company now boasts more than 7 million total registered users, with 100 of the Fortune 100 companies using the product. InVision is also part of the $100 million ARR club.

As Uber and Lyft reached their public-market nadir in mid-March, you would have been forgiven for thinking they were heading under. If the markets are somewhat efficient, why else would America’s top two ride-hailing companies shed two-thirds and three-quarters of their value, respectively, in just over a month?

As we know now, both companies quickly recovered and have since regained much of their former value. The two public firms have guided for a sharply unprofitable Q2 2020, but investors appear content to see their improving results as evidence that the worst is behind them.

Airbnb is another company that could be out of the worst of it and shared two data points lately that cast positive light on its operations. Three of the most famous American unicorns that were hit among the hardest by the pandemic, then, are coming back to a degree.

Today I want to parse the three companies’ public notes regarding their performance so we can track how their fortunes have changed. This will help us understand how much things have improved since their collective value reached all-time lows. And, it turns out that Uber and Lyft might have some good news for Airbnb shareholders.

Uber, Lyft

In mid-March, on the same day that Uber and Lyft shares came off their record lows, Uber told investors that “ride volume has gone down by as much as 60%-70% in recent days in the hardest-hit cities like Seattle,” but that it could get through “even in the worst-case scenario of rides down by 80% for the year” with enough cash to survive.

Enterprise automation startup JIFFY.ai announced today it has raised $18 million in Series A funding for product development and expansion into new markets around the world. The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Rebright Partners and W250 Venture Fund.

A roster of executives from tech companies also invested, including AssetMarket chief executive officer Charles Goldman; Costco chief financial officer Richard Galanti; Atlassian chief technology officer Sri Viswanath; former Nissan Motors chief information officer Tony Thomas; and former SunGard Wealth and Retirement chief operating officer Bob Ward.

JIFFY.ai, the brand name of Paanini, uses robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning and artificial intelligence to help companies automate tasks that are usually performed manually, making operations more time and cost efficient. Its platform also includes a design studio for no-code application development, and a configurable analytics dashboard to monitor automated processes.

JIFFY.ai’s largest equity shareholder is its non-profit organization, Paanini Foundation, which was created to provide job training and placement programs for people whose positions are displaced because of RPA and other automation tech. According to a report last year from Gartner, RPA is the fastest growing enterprise software market, and the research firm also predicts that by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of app development activity.

Co-founder and CEO Babu Sivadasan, who previously served as group president of Envestnet Retirement Solutions, told TechCrunch that Paanini Foundation “is an intrinsic part of who we are and our strategy, as the majority equity shareholder, the foundation will grow as the business grows.”

The foundation works with companies to retrain staff whose roles have been made redundant or changed because of automation and helps them find new job opportunities. “Our overall goal is to promote sustainable, compassionate entrepreneurship and our entire founding team are aligned around this core belief that we have a responsibility to give back to the community through our social programs and build a better workplace for tomorrow’s leaders,” said Sivadasan.

The company’s new funding will be used for its research and development operations and to scale its sales and marketing, with plans to expand in the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia.

JIFFY.ai’s clients include Southwest Airlines, which has used its platform to automate processes in revenue accounting, its supply chain and operating groups.

In a statement, Angela Marono, the airline’s managing director of business transformation, said, “JIFFY has been a strong partner since 2019 in helping us begin our automation journey—starting with RPA and moving towards achieving the full value of intelligent automation. This is an increasingly important part of our overall strategy as we embrace the rapid pace of change and desire to free up our people to focus on the highest value activities.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sivadasan said JIFFY.ai has seen more interest in its platform as large companies adapt to operating with a remote workforce, and need more help to make sure that their middle and back office processes are being done promptly and accurately.

For example, one of JIFFY.ai’s clients, an airline carrier, had to manage an influx of ticket cancellations, refunds and postponements.

“Staff shortages compounded with manual task errors led to significant backlog,” said Sivadasan. “Our platform was able to quickly automate thousands of hours of backlog by automating the processing of outbound requests, returns, cancellations, refunds, coupon and price management. The implementation processed nearly 90,000 transactions in a week, saving 2,000-plus hours of work. But this is not an isolated use case, many industries are facing difficulties adapting to the new world like this.”

Other RPA companies include Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and UiPath, which reached a $7 billion valuation last year after raising $568 million.

When asked how JIFFY.ai differentiates from other RPA providers, Sivadasan said “legacy RPA providers focus on a narrow range of process automation, heavily focused on the front end and data entry, and selling bots which require extensive upkeep and management. Our platform allows enterprises to not only deploy and manage process automation centrally, but our customers can design applications with simple drag and drop setup, resulting in transformation of the processes, rather than simply extending the life of legacy technologies.”

He added that JIFFY.ai’s platform “is the only context-aware system on the market, capable of recognizing mistakes and discrepancies in documents like loans, claims and invoices, and resolving them through the system’s self-learning capabilities.”

In a press statement, Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners, said, “JIFFY.ai is set to make enterprises vastly more efficient and will enable use cases not possible before. We are thrilled to partner with Babu and team in their pursuit of delivering an end to end solution for next generation AI-powered automation and app development across a broad range of industries.”

Sramana Mitra: What was Ocrolus doing that was brilliant? Nick Adams: I can’t share all of that, but they’ve done a couple of things around how they structure their team both on a technology...

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