Workflow automation startup Parabola raises $24M

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

Alex Yaseen, Parabola’s founder and CEO, says the new capital will be invested in hiring and product research and development. So far, the company has raised $34.2 million – including the last tranche.

“Most software companies have struggled with the pandemic, but we have succeeded,” Yaseen said. “2023 is the year of the operators and Parabola is the platform of choice to empower them.”

What exactly does Parabola do? Reduced to the essentials, the platform uses AI to automate various work processes. With Parabola, customers can accept documents such as PDFs, SMS logs, images and e-mails and have them standardized, enriched or categorized by Parabola.

For example, given a list of product names, Parabola can categorize them into specific departments, such as “Apparel,” “Household Goods,” “Grocery,” and “Electronics.” It can also standardize inconsistently formatted invoices and extract the amount, due date, sender information and line items from them into a spreadsheet. And it can analyze Amazon keyword rankings over a period of time, allowing ecommerce teams to optimize their product listings.

Yaseen describes Parabola as a “collaborative data tool” for non-technical users who would otherwise be engrossed in tedious manual processes and spreadsheets.

“Our key differentiator is our ability to be directly part of an operations team to create solutions to their own problems without creating data and IT bottlenecks,” said Yaseen. “This allows them to automate workflows that would otherwise change too quickly for engineers to code on their behalf.”

The story goes on

Business process automation is a growing trend. 66% of companies responded to a recent McKinsey survey and indicated that they had experimented with process automation in one or more business functions. The motivation is often cost savings. A UiPath survey estimates that companies can save an average of $1.5 million per year by automating at least some of their processes.

parabola

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

Not surprisingly, many vendors have sprung up to serve the large addressable market, including so-called integration platform-as-a-service vendors like Zapier, Workato, Tray, and Mulesoft, as well as in-house tool-building platforms like Retool and Airplane . Developer Retool has been doing particularly well lately, raising $45 million last July at a $3.2 billion valuation.

However, Yaseen argues that Parabola’s competitors – even the well-funded ones – focus less on building logic and more on transferring data between different systems and also require extensive technical resources.

“Many users choose to stick with their legacy and mundane processes because they are comfortable with them and because they believe their complex datasets cannot be automated,” he added. “[But] Business leaders can no longer devote their valuable technical resources to projects that could otherwise be achieved… We have developed a set of collaboration features that transform the “individual use case” into an “enterprise use case” and enable operations teams to do so to do We align on best practices and ultimately build on each other’s work.”

Parabola claims to have customers in a “broad range of industries,” including e-commerce, retail, consumer goods, and shipping and logistics. The 30-employee startup’s current client base is just over 500 brands, and Yaseen says there are plans to expand Parabola’s workforce to 60 by the end of the year.