RPA Supervisor lands money to help companies manage their various RPA platforms

Proving there is room in the robotic process automation (RPA) market for another vendor, RPA Supervisor today announced it has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Dawn Capital with participation from S16vc and existing investor MMC Ventures. The infusion, which brings the startup's total to $25 million, will be dedicated to product development and growing RPA Supervisor's overall workforce, CEO Tobias Gundhus told TechCrunch via email. /p>

RPA refers to tools that partially or fully automate manual, rules-based, and repetitive software tasks. Led by giants like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, the RPA industry has seen an impressive upward trajectory recently, with Forrester predicting that RPA-related services could bring in $16 billion by 2025.

But according to Gundhus, the success of RPA vendors masks the challenges faced by many organizations implementing RPA technologies. A recent survey found that 69% of organizations that have adopted RPA experience automation pipeline breaks at least once a week, and nearly half (41%) say it takes an average of five hours for to fix. A separate survey from Pega suggests that up to 45% of RPA deployments take between one and two years to deploy, much longer than expected.

“RPA Supervisor was created to address real-world issues plaguing RPA operations,” Gundhus said. “Together, Erik Lien, Anders Frostad and I recognized that dynamic orchestration, automated management and better visibility would allow RPA to reach its full potential and open the door to integration with technologies more complex intelligent automation systems. We set out to develop a platform that would deliver stable, responsive, and cost-effective robotic workers, and RPA Supervisor was launched in 2018."

Image credits: RPA Supervisor

RPA Supervisor is designed to orchestrate existing automation and RPA products, adding monitoring and queuing functionality to platforms such as Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, UiPath, Blue Prism and soon Automation Anywhere. Using RPA Supervisor, a customer can enter their "business needs" (as Gundhus puts it) for each automation process so that the RPA Supervisor engine prioritizes which RPA worker should work on which process. The platform adjusts capacity as needed, starting and stopping processes automatically to optimize the use of cloud or local compute resources.

RPA Supervisor also attempts to troubleshoot RPA systems when they arise. Gundhus claims that its exception and event management system can fix 90% of RPA failures, and in cases where it doesn't, the RPA supervisor sends an alert to the appropriate IT team.

From a dashboard, RPA Supervisor customers can manage and monitor RPA systems while viewing real-time metrics. While most RPA vendors offer built-in monitoring and reporting tools, Gundhus says they most often lack detail, especially in cases where multiple RPA solutions are in use.

​"The need for automation has been heightened by the pandemic, and as businesses rely on this type of technology, they have also begun to see the need for a centralized management platform" , said Gundhus. "Our platform offers an effective solution to reduce the total cost of ownership of an automation program, making it v...