A new RPA provider using an open-source model emerged from stealth mode this week with news of a $5.6 million seed funding round. San Francisco-based Robocorp believes the future of RPA is open source, enabling more companies to benefit from the technology.
“For all the benefits RPA has brought to businesses, it has only been able to help a sliver of the market due to the prohibitively high costs associated with these proprietary tools and the lack of a proper developer ecosystem,” the company wrote in a post on its corporate blog announcing its public launch and the funding.
Robocorp will use the cash infusion to add staff and to continue building out a cloud-based platform it says will enable companies to deploy and scale RPA faster and easier. The company said it has completed pilot tests of its platform with 10 consulting and integration partners deploying robots in the finance, transportation and logistics industries.
“Having an open-source standard for RPA means that even traditionally smaller companies will be able to afford to “robosource” their work,” the company said. “There will be hundreds of thousands of developers that share their work online and that can offer their services to customize workflows from readily available components. This kind of new marketplace of interoperable bots can truly change how millions of people work every day all over the world.”