Camunda got to Mars. With $100m they can go further

Camunda’s open-source approach has already delivered some impressive reach – as far as Mars if you include NASA’s use of their open-source automation to process data from the Perseverance lander.

The Germany-based company has raised a $100m in its latest series B round – to accelerate growth and scale its impact in the enterprise through the cloud.

With that new investment, it is ready to blast off with a go-to-market approach targeting developers and IT Management in the enterprise, and a newly-launched Camunda Cloud SaaS solution. The team is looking for scale in their core markets (Financial Services, Insurance, and Telecom) and rapid acceleration across Media, Transport and Logistics, Technology, Manufacturing, and, open-source champion, the Public Sector.

Developer-focus makes Camunda a favorite when complexity comes calling

Camunda’s focus on developer-friendliness has made it a strong option when enterprises are faced with automating relatively complex processes. Camunda CMO Gottfried Sehringer suggests that when businesses have to wire together processes involving elements that connect technologies developers are already working on, they need to have developers involved. While Camunda provides low-code features to make developers more productive, those features don’t limit the developer’s flexibility – a key differentiator vs low-code platforms.

The founders, Jakob Freund and Bernd Ruecker were experts in ‘real-world’ business process when they launched their consultancy in 2008, writing a book on best practices. Before they thought about software, they thought about process. Through heavy engagement in the Activiti open-source workflow engine, they saw an opportunity to shake up the old BPM market with a new open-source business model of their own. The move into software came in 2013.

Open source can offer a different try-before-you-buy dynamic with a deliberately developer-oriented and developer-friendly approach. To this day developers can create and automate a process using the open source Camunda Community Edition, completely free. It’s only when you need to roll that process across an enterprise, with all the monitoring and support required for scale, that money starts changing hands.

Enabling end-to-end processes meets the needs of HFS OneOffice

Camunda’s workflow capabilities – enabling end-to-end processes across the organizational value chain – make it a great example of one of the enabling technologies of the HFS OneOffice (see Exhibit 1, The OneOffice Emerging Tech Platform). OneOffice is the HFS vision of digital transformation.

As HFS has repeatedly stated, RPA is not the be all and end-all of process automation. It takes a toolkit. To that end, Camunda excels at enabling complex workflows and will happily leverage RPA where it adds required functionality to solutions. 

Exhibit 1: The OneOffice Emerging Tech Platform. Camunda resides in Workflow

Source: HFS Research 2021. Examples are representative

New enterprise platform is pure SaaS and Cloud Native

The enterprise version of its Camunda Cloud platform has just been launched. It is pure SaaS and currently hosted on Google Cloud, though architected to be hosted on multiple providers. Camunda Cloud has been designed to take advantage of cloud-native architectures (as discussed in the HFS Point of View: A Cloud Native mindset avoids swapping one technical debt for another), and is available on-demand, at cloud scale.

Self-funded for its first 10 years, when Highland Europe invested $30m at the end of 2018, Camunda was able to build on what had been a viral success story – growing through recommendation in the developer community. A GTM strategy targeting large enterprises has been reaping results with customers including five of the top 10 banks in the US, and big-name buyers such as Allianz, Vodafone, Viacom, Airbus, Intuit, Fujitsu, and the UK Home Office.

The next giant leap? Hand in hand with partners

With a further $100m of investment in March this year (led by Insight Partners and Highland Europe), Camunda can blast off on a mission to go deeper into the enterprises it is working with and expand beyond the 400+ paying enterprise customers already on its books. The business currently has almost 300 employees across 10 countries.

That next leap could be hand in hand with partners. Amdocs partners with Camunda to create a telecommunications industry solution and both Infosys and Wipro have built solutions with their offering. Cognizant and Capgemini are among the 100+ partners currently listed. Now Camunda is preparing to build out and organize a focused partnership program emphasizing quality not quantity.

The fact that 80% of its sales are currently direct, suggests serious headroom for growth through the partner channel.

The Bottom Line: Developer focus offers cut-through when enterprises face complex process automation

Camunda’s open-source approach has made it developer-focused in a way that now offers an advantage as enterprises shift from the simplicity of automating tasks to the complexity of automating end-to-end processes. Camunda will take the fullest advantage by developing a partner program with global SIs and reducing its reliance on direct sales.