Skan lands $40M to scale process intelligence

Skan, a process intelligence vendor, has announced it raised $40 million in its series B funding round. The company develops software to automatically map out business processes as part of digital transformation initiatives. Its architecture requires no integrations, which simplifies adoption and scalability. More than 40 customers, including banks, insurance companies and other large enterprises, use the Skan platform to continuously observe, understand and model their business processes.

Process intelligence is a critical component of the hyperautomation market that Gartner has predicted could reach $596 billion in 2022. These tools identify existing business processes to accelerate business re-engineering and automation using RPA and low-code tools. 

There are various flavors of process intelligence tools. The earliest tools pioneered by companies like Celonis used process mining to analyze system software logs. Skan has developed process capture tools that use machine vision to capture process data at the UI level. This is similar to companies like FortressIQ, which was recently acquired by Automation Anywhere. 

Automation in process intelligence

Skan was cofounded by Avinash Misra and Manish Garg, who, together, have founded several companies over the last 22 years. Genpact acquired their previous venture in 2015. 

Misra told VentureBeat that while at Genpact, they realized the fundamental root cause of all failures in digital transformation initiatives was the gap between executives’ understanding of how their business work and how work actually got done. 

The traditional approach to make sense of the business was to hire expensive process experts to interview staff and manually generate a process map. These interview-based process maps were static, one-time snapshots that sometimes miss the nuances of work. Skan was founded to help bridge this gap. 

“The power and the simplicity of Skan’s technology is that it captures these nuances without the input from people and requires zero technology integrations,” Misra said.

Investing in the future

This round brings Skan’s total raised to $54 million. These funds will be instrumental as the process intelligence platform continues to grow its global engineering teams, expand its product offerings and grow its partner ecosystem.

The company currently has about 70 employees and plans to double its team this year. The funding will also help improve product capabilities with an improved user experience and enhance capabilities for real-time compliance, operations, customer decision support and self-serve business intelligence. 

Misra said they also plan to improve AI models for root cause analysis, 360 automation scoring, real-time workload balancing and end-to-end Six Sigma and Lean management support. In addition, Skan is improving tools for federated learning that can make local updates to AI/ML models that mitigate privacy and security concerns. As a result, Skan can provide a SOC 2 compliant and ISO27001 certified solution that has also satisfied inquiries into GDPR compliance.

The combination of enhanced security and ease of integration help address top concerns IT teams face around digital transformation initiatives. IT leaders face pressure to increase efficiency, which needs to be balanced against growing scrutiny for conformance and compliance with the growth of work from home. 

Misra said, “Skan allows the enterprise to be self-aware as it looks to solve these issues and enables organizations to address these demands based on data and the power of AI.”

Dell Technologies Capital led the series B funding, with additional contributions from Citi Ventures Zetta Venture Partners, GSR Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Cathay Innovation and Firebolt Ventures.