digital transformation
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H2O Hospitality secures $30M Series C to expedite hotel digital transformation
The pandemic has triggered more demand for contactless and staff-less operations in the hospitality sector, and now H2O Hospitality, the unmanned hotel management company, has closed a $30 million round on the back of that boost. The South Korea and Japan-based startup automates front and backend processes including accommodation reservation, room management and front desk duties, and it will be using the funds to continue expanding its business.
The Series C round (equivalent to about 34 billion won) is being led by Kakao Investment and Korea Development Bank (KDB), Gorilla Private Equity, Intervest and NICE Investment also participated. With Southeast Asia’s joint fund, Kejora-Intervest Growth Fund also joined in the round, it is a sign that H2O Hospitality will be focusing specifically on the Southeast Asian Market. H2O Hospitality has raised $7 million Series B round from Samsung Ventures, Stonebridge Ventures, IMM Investment and Shinhan Capital in February 2020.
H2O Hospitality will expand its business further by adding various types of accommodations in South Korea and Japan in 2021 and 2022 and plans to enter Singapore and Indonesia in 4Q in 2022 in line with its Southeast Asia penetration strategy, according to H2O Hospitality co-founder and CEO John Lee.
“H2O Hospitality is currently speaking with several global hotel chain companies to partner with their digital transformation and operation outside of Korea and Japan,” Lee told TechCrunch.
H2O will invest in R&D to advance its customer channel solutions and contactless check-in systems depending on customer needs of each country in Asia, Lee continued.
“We need optimal system development and customization for each accommodation and situation to lead successful hotel digital transformation even after COVID-19,” Lee said in an email interview.
H2O Hospitality was founded in South Korea 2015 by CEO John Lee, and it has been on something of an acquisition-expansion spree. It entered Japan in 2017, for example, by acquiring several Japanese hospitality management companies. In 2021, H2O acquired two South Korean companies such as the contactless hotel solution company, ImGATE, and a local creator startup, Replace, in order to enhance its technology and ESG competence.
These days, the company operates approximately 7,500 accommodations including hotels, ryokans and guest houses, in Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Busan, and Bangkok.
H2O Hospitality’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-based hotel management system, which enables hotel management to automate and digitize, includes the Channel Management System (CMS), Property Management System (PMS), Room Management System (RMS), and Facility Management System (FMS).
Its integrated hotel management system can reduce hotel management’s fixed operating costs by 50%, while increasing revenue by as much as 20%, according to its statement.
“COVID-19 hit the hospitality industry the most and most of the hotels wanted to decrease their fixed cost level, but it was impossible with their current operational flow,” Lee continued, “They had to go through digital transformation”.
When asked how the pandemic affected H2O as COVID-19 still freezes most of the tourism industry, Lee said H2O’s revenue has been increased by as much as 30% before the pandemic, but that percentage has been dropped to 5-15% post COVID-19. Revenue drivers these days are based around tools it’s built to improve the efficiency of its customers. They include its automated dynamic pricing (ADR) tool and diverse sales channels like online and offline travel agencies in domestic and overseas, he said.
Lee also pointed out that H2O has been onboarding a lot of properties and that has also contributed to H2O’s revenue growth in the last 18 months. H2O was the only company in Asia, he claims, and many property owners have started to get onboard since August 2020, he explained.
“Every single hotel that we onboarded during the pandemic turned around their profits & losses statements and started to recover their financial loss,” Lee said.
There are currently about 16.4 million hotel rooms in the world that generate $570 billion a year, according to Lee. H2O believes that it can digitize all the lodging accommodations in the world as the company’s main goal is not building a hotel brand but allowing hotel owners to operate their properties with better operation, he said.
Lee explained that the current hotel operation process looks a lot like that of “2G phones”, that was at a stage before turning to smartphones, and H2O is turning the overall hotel operation into a “smartphone”.
“This is a very natural transition for the (hospitality) industry as it was also natural for the cellphone users to transit from 2G phone to smartphone,” Lee said.
Unfortunately, the cross-border inbound tourism market has still been stopped for both Korea and Japan even though each domestic market is still pumping demand for the market, Lee mentioned.
“We believe the inbound tourism market will recover within a year as the vaccinations grow for both countries (Korea and Japan),” Lee said.
Managing Director at Kejora-Intervest Growth Fund Jun-seok Kang told TechCrunch: “We knew this new wave for hotel digital transformation trend was coming even before the pandemic; however, COVID-19 definitely expedited the transition period, and we believe H2O will thrive in the transforming hotel market.”
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How to cut through the promotional haze and select a digital building platform
Everyone from investors to casual LinkedIn observers has more reasons than ever to look at buildings and wonder what’s going on inside. The property industry is known for moving slowly when it comes to adopting new technologies, but novel concepts and products are now entering this market at a dizzying pace.
However, this ever-growing array of smart-building products has made it confusing for professionals who seek to implement digital building platform (DBP) technologies in their spaces, let alone across their entire enterprise. The waters get even murkier when it comes to cloud platforms and their impact on ROI with regard to energy usage and day-to-day operations.
Breaking down technology decisions into bite-sized pieces, starting with fundamental functions, is the most straightforward way to cut through the promotional haze.
Facility managers, energy professionals and building operators are increasingly hit with daily requests to review the latest platform for managing and operating their buildings. Here are a few tips to help decision-makers clear through the marketing fluff and put DBP platforms to the test.
The why, how and what
Breaking down technology decisions into bite-sized pieces, starting with fundamental functions, is the most straightforward way to cut through the promotional haze. Ask two simple questions: Who on your team will use this technology and what problem will it solve for them? Answers to these questions will help you maintain your key objectives, making it easier to narrow down the hundreds of options to a handful.
Another way to prioritize problems and solutions when sourcing smart-building technology is to identify your use cases. If you don’t know why you need a technology platform for your smart building, you’ll find it difficult to tell which option is better. Further, once you have chosen one, you’ll be hard put to determine if it has been successful. We find use cases draw the most direct line from why to how and what.
For example, let’s examine the why, how and what questions for a real estate developer planning to construct or modernize a commercial office building:
- Why will people come? — Our building will be full of amenities and technological touches that will make discerning tenants feel comfortable, safe and part of a warm community of like-minded individuals.
- How will we do it? — Implement the latest tenant-facing technology offering services and capabilities that are not readily available at home. We will create indoor and outdoor environments that make people feel comfortable and happy.
- What tools, products and technology will we use?
This last question is often the hardest to answer and is usually left until the last possible moment. For building systems integrators, this is where the real work begins.
Focus on desired outcomes
When various stakeholder groups begin their investigations of the technology, it is crucial to define the outcomes everyone hopes to achieve for each use case. When evaluating specific products, it helps to categorize them at high levels.
Several high-level outcomes, such as digital twin enablement, data normalization and data storage are expected across multiple categories of systems. However, only an enterprise building management system includes the most expected outcomes. Integration platform as a service, bespoke reports and dashboarding, analytics as a service and energy-optimization platforms have various enabled and optional outcomes.
The following table breaks down a list of high-level outcomes and aligns them to a category of smart-building platforms available in the market. Expanded definitions of each item are included at the end of this article.
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Extra Crunch roundup: Inside Sprinklr’s IPO filing, how digital transformation is reshaping markets
Despite a recent history of uneven cash flow and moderate growth, SaaS customer experience management platform Sprinklr has filed to go public.
In today’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm pores over the New York-based unicorn’s S-1 to better understand exactly what Sprinklr offers: “Marketing and comms software, with some machine learning built in.”
Despite 19% growth in revenue over the last fiscal year, its deficits increased during the same period. But with more than $250 million in cash available, “Sprinklr is not going public because it needs the money,” says Alex.
Since we were off yesterday for Memorial Day, today’s roundup is brief, but we’ll have much more to recap on Friday. Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
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Once a buzzword, digital transformation is reshaping markets
Image Credits: metamorworks / Getty Images
The changes brought by a global shift to remote work and schooling are myriad, but in the business realm, they have yielded a change in corporate behavior and consumer expectations — changes that showed up in a bushel of earnings reports last week.
Startups have told us for several quarters that their markets are picking up momentum as customers shake up buying behavior with a distinct advantage for companies helping users move into the digital realm.
Public company results are now confirming the startups’ perspective. The accelerating digital transformation is real, and we have the data to prove it.
3 views on the future of meetings
Image Credits: Yann Maignan (opens in a new window) / Unsplash (opens in a new window)
In a recent episode of TechCrunch Equity, hosts Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm connected the dots between multiple funding rounds to sketch out three perspectives on the future of workplace meetings.
Each agreed that the traditional meeting is broken, so we gathered their perspectives about where the industry is heading and which aspects are ripe for disruption:
- Alex Wilhelm: Faster information throughput, please.
- Natasha Mascarenhas: Meetings should be ongoing, not in calendar invites.
- Danny Crichton: Redesign meetings for flow.
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Upstack raises $50M for its platform and advisory to help businesses plan and buy for digital transformation
Digital transformation has been one of the biggest catchphrases of the past year, with many an organization forced to reckon with aging IT, a lack of digital strategy, or simply the challenges of growth after being faced with newly-remote workforces, customers doing everything online and other tech demands.
Now, a startup called Upstack that has built a platform to help those businesses evaluate how to grapple with those next steps — including planning and costing out different options and scenarios, and then ultimately buying solutions — is announcing financing to do some growth of its own.
The New York startup has picked up funding of $50 million, money that it will be using to continue building out its platform and expanding its services business.
The funding is coming from Berkshire Partners, and it’s being described as an “initial investment”. The firm, which makes private equity and late-stage growth investments, typically puts between $100 million and $1 billion in its portfolio companies so this could end up as a bigger number, especially when you consider the size of the market that Upstack is tackling: the cloud and internet infrastructure brokerage industry generates annual revenues “in excess of $70 billion,” the company estimates.
We’re asking about the valuation, but PitchBook notes that the median valuation in its deals is around $211 million. Upstack had previously raised around $35 million.
Upstack today already provides tools to large enterprises, government organizations, and smaller businesses to compare offerings and plan out pricing for different scenarios covering a range of IT areas, including private, public and hybrid cloud deployments; data center investments; network connectivity; business continuity and mobile services, and the plan is to bring in more categories to the mix, including unified communications and security.
Notably, Upstack itself is profitable and names a lot of customers that themselves are tech companies — they include Cisco, Accenture, cloud storage company Backblaze, Riverbed and Lumen — a mark of how digital transformation and planning for it are not necessarily a core competency even of digital businesses, but especially those that are not technology companies. It says it has helped complete over 3,700 IT projects across 1,000 engagements to date.
“Upstack was founded to bring enterprise-grade advisory services to businesses of all sizes,” said Christopher Trapp, founder and CEO, in a statement. “Berkshire’s expertise in the data center, connectivity and managed services sectors aligns well with our commitment to enabling and empowering a world-class ecosystem of technology solutions advisors with a platform that delivers higher value to their customers.”
The core of the Upstack’s proposition is a platform that system integrators, or advisors, plus end users themselves, can use to design and compare pricing for different services and solutions. This is an unsung but critical aspect of the ecosystem: We love to hear and write about all the interesting enterprise technology that is being developed, but the truth of the matter is that buying and using that tech is never just a simple click on a “buy” button.
Even for smaller organizations, buying tech can be a hugely time-consuming task. It involves evaluating different companies and what they have to offer — which can differ widely in the same category, and gets more complex when you start to compare different technological approaches to the same problem.
It also includes the task of designing solutions to fit one’s particular network. And finally, there are the calculations that need to be made to determine the real cost of services once implemented in an organization. It also gives users the ability to present their work, which also forms a critical part of the evaluating and decision-making process. When you think about all of this, it’s no wonder that so many organizations have opted to follow the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of digital strategy.
As technology has evolved, the concept of digital transformation itself has become more complicated, making tools like Upstack’s more in demand both by companies and the people they hire to do this work for them. Upstack also employs a group of about 15 advisors — consultants — who also provide insight and guidance in the procurement process, and it seems some of the funding will also be used to invest in expanding that team.
(Incidentally, the model of balancing technology with human experts is one used by other enterprise startups that are built around the premise of helping businesses procure technology: BlueVoyant, a security startup that has built a platform to help businesses manage and use different security services, also retains advisors who are experts in that field.)
The advisors are part of the business model: Upstack’s customers can either pay Upstack a consulting fee to work with its advisors, or Upstack receives a commission from suppliers that a company ends up using, having evaluated and selected them via the Upstack platform.
The company competes with traditional systems integrators and consultants, but it seems that the fact that it has built a tech platform that some of its competitors also use is one reason why it’s caught the eye of investors, and also seen strong growth.
Indeed, when you consider the breadth of services that a company might use within their infrastructure — whether it’s software to run sales or marketing, or AI to run a recommendation for products on a site, or business intelligence or RPA — it will be interesting to see how and if Upstack considers deeper moves into these areas.
“Upstack has quickly become a leader in a large, rapidly growing and highly fragmented market,” said Josh Johnson, principal at Berkshire Partners, in a statement. “Our experience has reinforced the importance of the agent channel to enterprises designing and procuring digital infrastructure. Upstack’s platform accelerates this digital transformation by helping its advisors better serve their enterprise customers. We look forward to supporting Upstack’s continued growth through M&A and further investment in the platform.”
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SAP launches ‘RISE with SAP,’ a concierge service for digital transformation
SAP today announced a new offering it calls ‘RISE with SAP,’ a solution that is meant to help the company’s customers go through their respective digital transformations and become what SAP calls ‘intelligent enterprises.’ RISE is a subscription service that combines a set of services and product offerings.
SAP’s head of product success Sven Denecken (and its COO for S/4Hana) described it as “the best concierge service you can get for your digital transformation” when I talked to him earlier this week. “We need to help our clients to embrace that change that they see currently,” he said. “Transformation is a journey. Every client wants to become that smarter, faster and that nimbler business, but they, of course, also see that they are faced with challenges today and in the future. This continuous transformation is what is happening to businesses. And we do know from working together with them, that actually they agree with those fundamentals. They want to be an intelligent enterprise. They want to adapt and change. But the key question is how to get there? And the key question they ask us is, please help us to get there.”
With RISE for SAP, businesses will get a single contact at SAP to help guide them through their journey, but also access to the SAP partner ecosystem.
The first step in this process, Denecken stressed, isn’t necessarily to bring in new technology, though that is also part of it, but to help businesses redesign and optimize their business processes and implement the best practices in their verticals — and then measure the outcome. “Business process redesign means that you analyze how your business processes perform. How can you get tailored recommendations? How can you benchmark against industry standards? And this helps you to set the tone and also to motivate your people — your IT, your business people — to adapt,” Denecken described. He also noted that in order for a digital transformation project to succeed, IT and business leaders and employees have to work together.
In part, that includes technology offerings and adopting robotic process automation (RPA), for example. As Denecken stressed, all of this builds on top of the work SAP has done with its customers over the years to define business processes and KPIs.
On the technical side, SAP is obviously offering its own services, including its Business Technology Platform, and cloud infrastructure, but it will also support customers on all of the large cloud providers. Also included in RISE is support for more than 2,200 APIs to integrate various on-premises, cloud and non-SAP systems, access to SAP’s low-code and no-code capabilities and, of course, its database and analytics offerings.
“Geopolitical tensions, environmental challenges and the ongoing pandemic are forcing businesses to deal with change faster than ever before,” said Christian Klein, SAP’s CEO, in today’s announcement. “Companies that can adapt their business processes quickly will thrive – and SAP can help them achieve this. This is what RISE with SAP is all about: It helps customers continuously unlock new ways of running businesses in the cloud to stay ahead of their industry.”
With this new offering, SAP is now providing its customers with a number of solutions that were previously available through its partner ecosystem. Denecken doesn’t see this as SAP competing with its own partners, though. Instead, he argues that this is very much a partner play and that this new solution will likely only bring more customers to its partners as well.
“Needless to say, this has been a negotiation with those partners,” he said. “Because yes, it’s sometimes topics that we now take over they [previously] did. But we are looking for scale here. The need in the market for digital transformation has just started. And this is where we see that this is definitely a big offering, together with partners. “
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3 ways the pandemic is transforming tech spending
Ever since the pandemic hit the U.S. in full force last March, the B2B tech community keeps asking the same questions: Are businesses spending more on technology? What’s the money getting spent on? Is the sales cycle faster? What trends will likely carry into 2021?
Recently we decided to join forces to answer these questions. We analyzed data from the just-released Q4 2020 Outlook of the Coupa Business Spend Index (BSI), a leading indicator of economic growth, in light of hundreds of conversations we have had with business-tech buyers this year.
A former Battery Ventures portfolio company, Coupa* is a business spend-management company that has cumulatively processed more than $2 trillion in business spending. This perspective gives Coupa unique, real-time insights into tech spending trends across multiple industries.
Tech spending is continuing despite the economic recession — which helps explain why many startups are raising large rounds and even tapping public markets for capital.
Broadly speaking, tech spending is continuing despite the economic recession — which helps explain why many tech startups are raising large financing rounds and even tapping the public markets for capital. Here are our three specific takeaways on current tech spending:
Spending is shifting away from remote collaboration to SaaS and cloud computing
Tech spending ranks among the hottest boardroom topics today. Decisions that used to be confined to the CIO’s organization are now operationally and strategically critical to the CEO. Multiple reasons drive this shift, but the pandemic has forced businesses to operate and engage with customers differently, almost overnight. Boards recognize that companies must change their business models and operations if they don’t want to become obsolete. The question on everyone’s mind is no longer “what are our technology investments?” but rather, “how fast can they happen?”
Spending on WFH/remote collaboration tools has largely run its course in the first wave of adaptation forced by the pandemic. Now we’re seeing a second wave of tech spending, in which enterprises adopt technology to make operations easier and simply keep their doors open.
SaaS solutions are replacing unsustainable manual processes. Consider Rhode Island’s decision to shift from in-person citizen surveying to using SurveyMonkey. Many companies are shifting their vendor payments to digital payments, ditching paper checks entirely. Utility provider PG&E is accelerating its digital transformation roadmap from five years to two years.
The second wave of adaptation has also pushed many companies to embrace the cloud, as this chart makes clear:
Image Credits: Battery Ventures (opens in a new window)
Similarly, the difficulty of maintaining a traditional data center during a pandemic has pushed many companies to finally shift to cloud infrastructure under COVID. As they migrate that workload to the cloud, the pie is still expanding. Goldman Sachs and Battery Ventures data suggest $600 billion worth of disruption potential will bleed into 2021 and beyond.
In addition to SaaS and cloud adoption, companies across sectors are spending on technologies to reduce their reliance on humans. For instance, Tyson Foods is investing in and accelerating the adoption of automated technology to process poultry, pork and beef.
All companies are digital product companies now
Mention “digital product company” in the past, and we’d all think of Netflix. But now every company has to reimagine itself as offering digital products in a meaningful way.
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Customer experience and digital transformation concepts are merging during the pandemic
Customer experience and digital transformation are two terms we’ve been hearing about for years, but have often remained nebulous in many organizations — something to aspire to perhaps, but not take completely seriously. Yet the pandemic has been a forcing event for both concepts, thrusting the ideas front and center.
Suddenly startups that help with either of these concepts are seeing rising demand, even in a year with an overall difficult economic climate. If you are fortunate enough to be helping companies digitize a process or improve how customers interact with companies, you may be seeing increased interest from customers and potential acquirers (and this was true even before this year). A case in point is Twilio acquiring Segment for $3.2 billion recently to help build data-fueled applications to interact with customers.
Even though building a positive customer experience has never been completely about digital, at a time where it’s difficult to interact with customers in person, the digital side of it has taken new urgency. As COVID-19 took hold this year, businesses, large and small, suddenly realized the only way to connect to their customers was digitally. At that point, digital transformation became customer experience’s buddy when other ways of contacting one another have been severely limited.
Pandemic brings changes
Just about every startup founder I talk to these days, along with bigger, more established companies, talk about how the pandemic has pushed companies to digitally transform much faster than they would have without COVID.
Brent Leary, founder at CRM Essentials, says that the pandemic has certainly expedited the need to bring these two big ideas together and created opportunities as that happens. “The coronavirus, as terrible as it has been in so many ways to so many people, has created opportunities for companies to build direct-to-consumer (D2C) digital pipelines that can make them stronger companies despite the current hardships,” Leary told TechCrunch.
The cloud plays a big role in the digital transformation process, and for the last decade, we have seen companies make a slow but steady shift to the cloud. When you have a situation like we’ve had with the coronavirus, it speeds everything up. As it turns out, being in the cloud helps you move faster because you don’t have to worry about all of the overhead of running a business critical application as the SaaS vendors take care of all that for you.
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The accelerating digital transformation, redux
Earlier this week, TechCrunch covered a grip of earnings reports showing that some companies helping other businesses move to modern software solutions are seeing accelerated growth. Inside the Software as a Service (SaaS) world, this is known as the digital transformation. Based on how many software companies are talking about it, the pace of change is only picking up.
But since we published that first entry, a number of SaaS companies that have posted financial results seemed to disappoint investors. Seeing some companies in the high-flying sector struggle made us sit back and think. What was going on?
Today we’re going to explore how the digital transformation’s acceleration seems real enough, but how it’s not landing equally. We’ll start by going over a short run of earnings results, talk to Yext CEO Howard Lerman about what his B2B SaaS company is seeing, and wrap with notes on what could be coming next from software shops.
A quick word on digital transformation
We all hear about digital transformation, but it’s hard to define. Generally, it’s a broad area that includes digitization of manual processes, modern software development practices like continuous delivery and containerization and a general way of moving faster via technology — especially in the cloud.
Speaking last month on Extra Crunch Live, Box CEO Aaron Levie defined the term as he sees it. “The way that we think about digital transformation is that much of the world has a whole bunch of processes and ways of working — ways of communicating and ways of collaborating where if those business processes or that way we worked were able to be done in digital forms or in the cloud, you’d actually be more productive, more secure and you’d be able to serve your customers better. You’d be able to automate more business processes.” he said.
What we’re seeing now is that the pandemic has accelerated the rate of change much faster than many had anticipated. Efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 and its related workplace disruptions have accelerated what would have been a normal timetable. But on its own, that doesn’t mean the market is seeing equal results across every company and industry that might be part of that trend.
Earnings results
Lots of SaaS companies reported earnings this week, but two sets of returns stuck out as we reviewed the results, those from Slack and Smartsheet.
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Box builds a digital hub to help fight content fragmentation
The interconnectedness of the cloud has allowed us to share content widely with people inside and outside the organization and across different applications, but that ability has created a problem of its own, a kind of digital fragmentation. How do you track how that piece of content is being used across a range of cloud services? It’s a problem Box wants to solve with its latest features, Activity Stream and Recommended Apps.
The company made the announcements at BoxWorks, its annual customer conference being held this week in San Francisco,
Activity Stream provides a way to track your content in real time as it moves through the organization, including who touches it and what applications it’s used in, acting as a kind of digital audit trail. One of the big problems with content in the cloud age is understanding what happened to it after you created it. Did it get used in Salesforce or ServiceNow or Slack? You can now follow the path of your content and see how people have shared it, and this could help remove some of the disconnect people feel in the digital world.
As Jeetu Patel, Box’s Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer points out, an average large company could have more than a thousand apps and there is no good way to connect the dots when it comes to tracking unstructured content and getting a unified view of the digital trail.
“We integrate with over 1400 applications, and as we integrate with those applications, we thought if we could surface those events, it would be insanely useful to our users,” he said. Patel sees this as the beginning of an important construct, the notion of a content hub where you can see the entire transaction record associated with a piece of content.
Activity Stream sidebar inside Box. Photo: Box
But Box didn’t want to stop with just a laundry list of the connections. It also created deep links into the applications being used, so a user can click a link, open the application and view the content in the context of that other application. “It seems like Box was a logical place to get a bird’s eye view of how content is being used,” Patel said, explaining Box’s thinking in creating this feature.
A related feature is a list of Recommended Apps. Based the Box Graph, and what Box knows about the user, the content they use, and how it’s interconnected with other cloud apps, it also displays a list of recommended apps right in the Box interface. This lets users access those applications in the context of their work, so for instance, they could share the content in Slack right from the document.
Recommended Apps bar inside Box. Photo: Box
For starters, Recommended Apps integrations include G Suite apps, Slack, Salesforce, DocuSign and Netsuite, but Patel says anyone who is integrated with the web app via the API will start showing up in Activity Stream.
While the products were announced today, Box is still working out the kinks in terms of how this will work. They expect these features to be available early next year. If they can pull this off, it will go a long way toward solving the digital fragmentation problem and making Box the content center for organizations.
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Parsable secures $40M investment to bring digital to industrial workers
As we increasingly hear about automation, artificial intelligence and robots taking away industrial jobs, Parsable, a San Francisco-based startup sees a different reality, one with millions of workers who for the most part have been left behind when it comes to bringing digital transformation to their jobs.
Parsable has developed a Connected Worker platform to help bring high tech solutions to deskless industrial workers who have been working mostly with paper-based processes. Today, it announced a $40 million Series C cash injection to keep building on that idea.
The round was led by Future Fund with help from B37 and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Airbus Ventures and Aramco Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total to nearly $70 million.
The Parsable solution works on almost any smartphone or tablet and is designed to enter information while walking around in environments where a desktop PC or laptop simply wouldn’t be practical. That means being able to tap, swipe and select easily in a mobile context.
Photo: Parsable
The challenge the company faced was the perception these workers didn’t deal well with technology. Parsable CEO Lawrence Whittle says the company, which launched in 2013, took its time building its first product because it wanted to give industrial workers something they actually needed, not what engineers thought they needed. This meant a long period of primary research.
The company learned, it had to be dead simple to allow the industry vets who had been on the job for 25 or more years to feel comfortable using it out of the box, while also appealing to younger more tech-savvy workers. The goal was making it feel as familiar as Facebook or texting, common applications even older workers were used to using.
“What we are doing is getting rid of [paper] notebooks for quality, safety and maintenance and providing a digital guide on how to capture work with the objective of increasing efficiency, reducing safety incidents and increasing quality,” Whittle explained.
He likens this to the idea of putting a sensor on a machine, but instead they are putting that instrumentation into the hands of the human worker. “We are effectively putting a sensor on humans to give them connectivity and data to execute work in the same way as machines,” he says.
The company has also made the decision to make the platform flexible to add new technology over time. As an example they support smart glasses, which Whittle says accounts for about 10 percent of its business today. But the founders recognized that reality could change and they wanted to make the platform open enough to take on new technologies as they become available.
Today the company has 30 enterprise customers with 30,000 registered users on the platform. Customers include Ecolab, Schlumberger, Silgan and Shell. They have around 80 employees, but expect to hit 100 by the end of Q3 this year, Whittle says.
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