Workflow Automation Startup Parabola Raises $24 Million

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Parabola, a San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to help accelerate back-office processes, especially in the logistics and e-commerce sectors, today announced a Series B funding round led by OpenView with participation from strategic investor Flexport. announced that it has raised $24 million. Matrix, Thrive, Flexport, Good Friends, Webflow, Others Fund, Abstract Ventures, Merus Capital.

Parabola founder and CEO Alex Yacine said the new funding will go towards hiring and product research and development. To date, the company has raised $34.2 million, including the latest tranche.

“Most software companies have struggled due to the pandemic, but we have succeeded,” said Yassine. “2023 is the year of the operator and Parabola is the go-to platform to empower them.”

So what exactly does Parabola do? Essentially, the platform applies AI to automate different workflows. With Parabola, a customer can take his PDFs, text message logs, images, emails and other documents and have them standardized, enhanced or categorized by her Parabola.

For example, given a list of product names, Parabola can categorize products according to specific departments such as “Clothing”, “Houseware”, “Groceries”, and “Electronics”. You can also standardize inconsistently formatted invoices and extract amounts, due dates, sender information, and line items into separate tables. It can also analyze keyword rankings on Amazon within a specific time period, allowing e-commerce teams to optimize their product listings.

Yaseen describes Parabola as a “collaborative data tool” for non-expert users who rely on otherwise tedious manual processes and spreadsheets.

“Our key differentiator is being directly owned by our operations team and being able to build solutions to unique problems without getting stuck in data and IT bottlenecks,” Yacine said. “This allows us to automate workflows that change too quickly for engineers to write code for us.”

Business process automation is a growing trend, and a recent McKinsey survey found that 66% of organizations have experimented with process automation for one or more business functions. Often the motivation is cost reduction. A UiPath study estimates that businesses can save an average of $1.5 million annually by automating at least some of their processes.

Parabola’s workflow automation platform connects apps and automates processes.

Naturally, many vendors have emerged to serve the large market they can serve, including so-called integration platform-as-a-service providers such as Zapier, Workato, Tray, and Mulesoft, as well as internal tool building platforms such as Retool and Airplane. Appearing. Developer. Retool has been particularly strong lately, last July when he raised $45 million at a valuation of $3.2 billion.

However, Parabola’s competitors, even well-funded companies, are more focused on transferring data between different systems than building logic, and require extensive technical resources to get started. Yes, argues Yaseen.

“Many users choose to stick with outdated and mundane processes because they are familiar and believe complex datasets cannot be automated,” he added. “[But] Corporate leaders can no longer deplete valuable engineering resources on projects that could otherwise be accomplished. We’ve built a set of collaboration capabilities that turn ‘personal use cases’ into ‘enterprise use cases’, enabling operations teams to work together. We practice best practices and ultimately build on each other’s achievements. “

Parabola claims to have customers in a “wide range of industries” including e-commerce, retail, consumer goods, delivery and logistics. The 30-employee startup’s current customer base is just over 500 brands, and Yacine said he plans to grow Parabola’s workforce to 60 by the end of the year.