WorkFusion, a business process automation software developer, has raised $50 million in a new, strategic round of funding as it prepares to start adding new verticals to its product suite.The company new cash came from the large insurance company, Guardian; healthcare services provider New York-Presbyterian; and the commercial bank, PNC Bank.
Venture investor Alpha Intelligence Capital, which specializes in backing artificial intelligence-enabled companies, also participated in the new financing.Certainly WorkFusion seems to have come a long way since its days hiring crowdsourced workers to train algorithms how to automate the workflows that used to be done manually.
The company has raised a lot of money — roughly $121 million, according to Crunchbase —which is some kind of validation, and in its core markets of financial services and insurance it attracted some real fans.&Guardian uses data to better understand and serve customers, and WorkFusion will bring new data-driven intelligence capabilities into the company,& said Dean Del Vecchio, executive vice president, chief information officer and head of Enterprise Shared Services at Guardian, in a statement.
&We look to invest in and deploy RPA and AI technology that can help us leap forward in operations and improve outcomes — WorkFusion has that potential.&According to chief executive Alex Lyashok, the company now intends to begin looking at acquisition opportunities that can &complement our technology,& he said.
&WorkFusion today is focused on banking, financial services and insurance.
This problem [of automation] is not endemic to those industries.&Particularly of interest to the New York-based company are those industries that missed out on the first wave of automation and digitization.
&Industries that have already invested in digitization are being very aggressive, but companies that have been very manual and then have not developed a technology program internally,& also represent a big opportunity, Lyashok said.