A software company building AI that learns to automate repetitive computer tasks has raised £4.5 million in funding.
London-based Mimica’s first product, Mapper, learns patterns from employee clicks and keystrokes and generates process maps. These have historically been created by business analysts through manual effort.
It supports robotic process automation teams, behind the building of software bots that complete repetitive tasks such as data entry, form completion and claim and ticket processing.
According to McKinsey, 69% of data processing and 64% of data collection activities could feasibly be automated. Mapper’s process maps identify opportunities for automation and create blueprints for the software bots.
In the future, Mimica plans to automatically generate RPA code, thereby realising its vision of building AI that can mimic humans.
The Series A funding comes from Khosla Ventures and adds to the seed investment from Entrepreneur First and Episode 1.
It will help to further the company’s growth by establishing a sales team in the US and multiplying its investment in R&D, including the launch of a new discovery tool, Miner, which helps enterprises to identify new automation opportunities by conducting a broad sweep across tens of thousands of employees and ranks their tasks by automatability.
Already successfully piloted by AT&T, Miner provides the shortlist for automation before Mapper turns it into a reality, creating the business process maps that the RPA bots need to do their work.
For Dell, Mimica reduced the lead time for bot deployments by 65%, equivalent to three times more automation per year.
To support the product development and global expansion, the new investment will be used to scale the Mimica team from 15 to 50 over the next two years.
“RPA is the perfect beachhead for our tech because buyers experience so much pain after their purchases,” said CEO Tuhin Chakraborty. “It’s torture, digging for automation opportunities and building process maps by hand, and it’s unnecessary.
“Mimica is loved by Dell and AT&T because it does the work faster and more accurately, across tens of thousands of employees.
“With Khosla Ventures’ investment we’ll bring our tech to the rest of the Fortune 500 and take the next big steps in our product roadmap. Soon we’ll be generating bots automatically, on the march toward entrusting AI with the world’s monotonous digital work.”
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, added: “We invested in Mimica because the founding team has a terrific combination of deep technical expertise in building AI systems, and a thorough understanding of the challenges faced by an enterprise when managing processes.
“Mimica’s AI-based technology addresses the biggest challenges in automating business processes, and therefore we believe Mimica is positioned to become the dominant automation solution. I look forward to assisting Tuhin in making Mimica wildly successful.”