Orby AI Raises $30M to Take Business Process Automation to the Next Level with Generative AI

Orby AI Inc., an enterprise automation startup powered by generative artificial intelligence, today announced it has closed an early-stage funding round of $30 million, furthering the company's mission to remove mundane processes from work.

Today's Series A round was led by New Enterprise Associates, Wing VC and Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo, with participation from Pear VC, which co-led the company's initial $4.5 million seed round in May 2023.

Orby AI hopes to use advanced generative AI models to address some of the pain points in enterprise automation, particularly those related to automating more complex tasks.

The startup explains that most businesses today need to perform a variety of tasks, including data entry, document processing, validating complex forms, contracts, invoices, etc. While existing automation tools can perform these basic tasks, they are not always successful because they lack the sophistication required to complete more complex workflows. This is because these legacy tools are only designed to perform rule-based automation – a system that stores, sorts, and manipulates data by applying human-created rules.

One of the problems with rules-based automation is that it tends to be inflexible and unable to accommodate technological or formatting changes. For example, if a rules-based automation tool is tasked with transferring data from one interface to another, differences in how that data is formatted may mean it can't complete the task, the startup explains.

Orby AI wants to go beyond rules-based automation, and to do so it has developed what it calls an industry-first end-to-end generative AI platform for enterprise automation. The platform combines what it calls “multi-modal large-scale action models” with AI agents capable of using symbolic reasoning and neural network-based analysis. This foundation allows Orby to understand what is needed when faced with more complex automation requests.

The startup calls its system “agent process automation,” or APA, and says it's the next step up from traditional “robotic process automation,” or RPA, tools that currently dominate the industry. Orby says APA combines the advanced cognitive capabilities of generative AI with the most sophisticated automation to perform more complex business tasks that involve complex planning, reasoning, and adaptation.

Orby says that when its AI agents are given a task to complete, including a set of instructions, the agents autonomously generate a workflow that integrates with other, more specialized AI agents to perform various subtasks required to accomplish the main task. These subtasks could include data analysis or customer interactions, the company explained. By using different AI agents to complete each related task, Orby promises it can handle much more complex work in a variety of scenarios.

Co-founder and CEO Vera Liu said traditional RPA systems weren't designed to handle the most dynamic and complex enterprise workflows. “We push the boundaries of what AI can do for businesses with an entirely new platform that observes and learns from every task that's performed,” she said. “We analyze tasks in context and create automated workflows that can be executed instantly.”

Orby says its Large Scale Action Model (LAM) is the secret sauce that enables AI agents to learn, reason, and execute repetitive workflow processes. It automates the discovery, understanding, and learning of common patterns and relationships that exist across unstructured datasets. This allows AI agents to behave very similarly to humans and handle almost any kind of repetitive task.

Dan Twing, analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, says Orby's LAM technology is key to overcoming traditional RPA challenges, simplifying the workflow definition process for users: “Through neuro-symbolic programming, the platform captures standard process flows and ensures robust exception handling to deliver resilient automation solutions, enabling enterprises to take advantage of AI-driven automation and become highly efficient.”

The startup said today's funding will be used to bring its generative AI process automation platform to the mass market and further develop it.

Image: Orby AI