Why Tray.io wants to put hyperautomation on the IT map

Tray.io, a next-gen automation/integration software maker, wants to own the emerging hyperautomation sector. It plans to do this by providing new low-code automation tools via IPaaS (integration platform as a service) to upgrade legacy systems to much faster hyperautomated units. 

The San Francisco-based company, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary and today revealed an influx of $40 million in new VC funding, is enabling companies to address their business-process problems by utilizing a new wave of low-code automation development for line-of-business users. “This will put the power in the hands of the team members best suited to solve them,” CEO and co-founder Rich Waldron told ZDNET.

What exactly is hyperautomation, you ask? It’s akin to DevOps, which combines the forces of development and operations to speed up and automate software production. Hyperautomation is a disciplined, business-driven IT approach used to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. It involves the rapid orchestration – utilizing SaaS – of multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

Current use-case examples of hyperautomation include understanding documents using OCR (optical character recognition); reading multiple emails quickly using NLP (natural language processing); forecasting stocks and enhancing automation flows by using AI/ML. 

Tray.io’s highly-scalable cloud service enables line-of-business and technical users to connect disparate systems and build hyperautomation workflows. For example, team members needing to solve departmental process challenges such as revenue operations, HR onboarding, finance quote to cash, or IT user provisioning no longer need to rely on a third party to solve back-end complexity of integrations (this includes testing, error-handling, logging, resiliency, cost and security).

Waldron told ZDNET that the Tray.io platform not only sets up systems to use hyperautomation but it also helps solve the unintended consequences of digital transformation. 

“Digital transformation and the shift to the cloud have forced enterprise architectures to take advantage of the scale, elasticity and economics now available, exposing the shortcomings of legacy approaches to iPaaS,” Waldron said. “Legacy products bring outdated constructs such as manual provisioning, limited scale, long development cycles and heavy maintenance. 

“Our objective is to create a world where anyone in any department can solve business problems without the constraints of poorly adapted technology.”

Gartner Research claims that the need for hyperautomation is creating a total software market that will reach $860 billion by 2025.  

Tray.io’s $40 million in new funding will go mostly into new product development Waldron said. Investors included Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), True Ventures, GGV Capital, Spark Capital, Meritech Capital Partners and Stepstone Group, bringing Tray.io’s total VC funding to $109.1 million.