INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Laiye, a Chinese startup that offers robotic process automation services to several major tech firms in the nation and government agencies,
has raised $42 million in a new funding round as it looks to scale its business.
The new financing round, Series C, was co-led by Lightspeed
Venture Partners and Lightspeed China Partners
Cathay Innovation, which led the startup Series B+ round and Wu Capital, which led the Series B round, also participated in the new
round.
China has been the hub for some of the cheapest labor in the world
But in recent years, a number of companies and government agencies have started to improve their efficiency with the help of
technology.
That where Laiye comes into play
Robotic process automation (RPA) allows software to mimic several human behaviors such as keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.
&For instance,
a number of banks did not previously offer APIs, so humans had to sign in and fetch the data and then feed it into some other software
Processes like these could be automated by our platform,& said Arvid Wang, co-founder and co-chief executive of Laiye, in an interview with
TechCrunch.
The four-and-a-half-year-old startup, which has raised more than $100 million to date, will use the fresh capital to hire talent
from across the globe and expand its services
&We believe robotic process automation will achieve its full potential when it combines AI and the best human talent,& he said.
Laiye
announcement today comes as the market for robotic automation process is still in nascent stage in China
There are a handful of startups looking into this space, but Laiye, which counts Microsoft as an investor, and Sequoia-backed UiPath are
the two clear leaders in the market currently.
As my colleague Rita Liao wrote last year, it was only recently that some entrepreneurs and
investors in China started to shift their attention from consumer-facing products to business applications.
Globally, RPA has emerged as the
fastest growing market in enterprise space
A Gartner report found last year that RPA market grew over 63% in 2018
Recent surveys have shown that most enterprises in China today are also showing interest in enhancing their RPA projects and AI
capabilities.
Laiye today has more than 200 partners and more than 200,000 developers have registered to use its multilingual UiBot RPA
UiBot enables integration with Laiye native and third-party AI capabilities such as natural language processing, optical character
recognition, computer vision, chatbot and machine learning.
&We are very bullish on China, and the opportunities there are massive,& said
Lightspeed partner Amy Wu in an interview
&Laiye is doing phenomenally there, and with this new fundraise, they can look to expand globally,& she said.
