Workflow automation platform Conexiom raises $130M
Conexiom, a Vancouver, Canada-based company developing workflow automation software for manufacturers and distributors, today announced it has raised $130 million in a funding round led by Warburg Pincus, with participation from Luminate Capital and Iconiq Growth. The funds bring Conexiom’s total raised to date to roughly $170 million, and CEO Ray Grady says the money will be put toward platform R&D and hiring.
Annually, more than $15 trillion dollars of order-to-cash and procure-to-pay transactions are processed manually in North America and Europe. Although companies spend billions each year on digital transformation initiatives, approximately 50% of business-to-business transactions still involve emailing documents between buyers and sellers and manually keying data into systems.
Founded in 2001, Conexiom aims to deliver automated processing capabilities that turn unstructured data into “touchless” transactions. The platform automates invoices, vendor documents, order acknowledgements, requests for quotes, special pricing agreements, and more, delivering key data into enterprise resource management (ERM) systems and other databases of record.
Above: Conexiom’s workflow automation platform.
“Conexiom’s customers face growing challenges that are accelerating the need for automation solutions. Our platform is mission-critical to our customers, helping them automate and scale their order-to-cash and procure-to-pay processes,” Grady said in a press release. “This investment is great validation of our people, platform, and market leadership and will help us accelerate product investment to meet growing market demand.”
For example, Conexiom can automatically capture data from a purchase order and translate it into a sales order within an ERP system. Grady claims that for McNaughton-McKay, whose customers place multiple orders a week with 70 line items or more on average, it has brought order processing time down to minutes rather than hours.
“Our staff is as good as it gets, but they’re human. Mistakes are going to happen, which meant our teams needed to carve out time for returns, exchanges, and rebills when they were already overloaded,” McNaughton-McKay senior project manager Denny Wyss said in a statement. “The part that impresses me most is Conexiom’s ability to take a manual order process and reduce the time spent on it to virtually nothing.”
Growth market
The workflow automation market was valued at $8.07 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $39.49 billion by 2027, climbing at a compound annual growth rate of 23.68% from 2020 to 2027. The pandemic is responsible for the uptick, particularly in manufacturing, where it drove businesses to digitally automate what were previously repetitive, offline manual tasks. According to a recent survey commissioned by Google, two-thirds of manufacturers using AI in their operations report that their reliance on AI has increased. Even among firms that currently don’t use AI, about a third believe it would make employees more efficient and be helpful for employees overall, according to Google.
In some respects, Conexiom competes with sales automation platforms like Revenue Grid that have raised tens of millions in venture capital to date. Forrester reports that over 30% of all business-to-business companies adopted AI to improve at least one of their main sales workflows, as of last year. RightBound offers a platform to automate back-office sales processes. Rival SugarCRM provides a predictive AI engine for marketing automation.
But since Luminate bought a majority stake in Conexiom in 2018, the company has grown over 6 times in size and now processes over $100 billion in business-to-business transactions annually, with customers including Chevron and HP. Conexiom doubled its headcount in 2020 and plans to focus on growing its engineering, account management, and account services teams across offices in Ontario, London, Munich, and Chicago.
“As the demand for software-as-a-service-based systems grows, we continue to see significant growth opportunity for companies like Conexiom. Our investment underscores our long-term commitment to investing strategically in market-leading, business-to-business software businesses,” Warburg Pincus managing director Justin Sadrian said in a press release.
Source: https://venturebeat.com/2021/09/28/workflow-automation-platform-conexiom-raises-100m/
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