HFS Highlight: Oh boyo! Roboyo scores €21 million in Series A investment in a bizarrely well-timed move

Hot off the press, Roboyo, one of the rising stars covered by HFS earlier this year in our report “The Specialists: The Rise and Evolution of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Pure Play Service Providers” just announced a meaty Series A round to the tune of €21 million. The Nuremberg, Germany-based Roboyo has done an exclusive minority stake deal with MML Capital Partners, a leading growth capital investor with offices in London, Paris, and New York. In conversation with Christian Voigt, Founder and Managing Director of Roboyo, he indicated that “we’ll use the investment for continued international expansion, particularly to fuel growth in North America, and to support the development of evolving service delivery models such as Automation-as-a-Service”.

The burning platform for automation has arrived and Roboyo is taking its shot.  

Doubling down on its growth plans during a global pandemic is a bold move by Roboyo, but it is one that is oddly well-timed. Founded in Germany in 2015 by former Big 4 consultants, Roboyo helped develop the RPA market in continental Europe before expanding to North America and AP. Its sustained triple-digit growth is driven by consulting-led process optimization, custom development, and productization of its internal IP with its Converge platform to accelerate and manage engagements.

At its heart process automation is about improving processes, not propping up the same old moldy mountains of process debt with point solutions to make things slightly less painful, cheaper than offshore, and a bit faster. This was the decently universal stall point for many companies, that is until a global pandemic forced the rapid virtualization of business operations ushering in the burning platform for automation.

One of the many bizarre silver linings of the pandemic is its role as the great contextualizer of digital, promoter of change, and catalyst for ruthless prioritization of “have-to-have” investments. As shown in Exhibit 1, the fundamental purpose of investing in process automation, and the rest of the triple-A trifecta technologies (AI, and analytics), has moved from cost savings to being essential for future survival. Roboyo’s specialized brand of consulting-led process optimization, tech expertise and deep focus on enablement, and effective automation lifecycle management can help enterprises create and sustain viable automation programs.

Exhibit 1. The COVID effect on enterprise investment priorities in emerging technologies

Sample: 300 executives (May-Jun 2020) and 600 executives (Mar-Apr 2020) across Global 2000 enterprises
Source: HFS Research in conjunction with KPMG

Kudos to the team at MML for seeing the potential. While this is their first foray into the intelligent automation services space, their investments with other emerging tech-focused services firms such as  CSI (current – cloud, data, and cyber manager services) and notably Altius (realized – a data and AI consultancy acquired by Avanade in March 2020)  helped inform their investment thesis.

The Bottom Line. Roboyo needs to go deep on process automation excellence. By definition, this has to be more than RPA.

Enterprises have a once in a lifetime opportunity to change how they operate and Roboyo, as an automation specialist, is uniquely positioned to help them. Its core strengths of consulting-led process optimization, strong tech skills, IP-based solutions to help manage and ensure program success, and even its skills training are all essential to helping clients create scalable programs that achieve outcomes. But this has to go beyond RPA. Already we see the automation tides shifting as enterprise software companies like Pega, SAP, Appian, Microsoft, IBM, and now Hyland scoop up the RPA software companies that are not UiPath, Blue Prism, or Automation Anywhere. The precise reason HFS declared RPA is dead in April 2019 was to make the point that no singular tool can drive transformation. Roboyo is already on this path and can hasten its and its clients’ success by embracing the HFS triple-A trifecta of automation, AI, and smart analytics and enable greater outcomes.