Workato is transformational automation like sound recording says CEO Vijay Tella
Vijay Tella, co-founder and CEO Workato
January 23, 2022
Businesses use a variety of separate, disconnected technology solutions for integration of mobile and other applications, data integration, process automation, chatbots for human interactions and other tasks. While they each solve a specific problem, the fragmentation slows down overall work productivity.
“Business apps had become simpler, mobile, inexpensive, fast and beautiful, while the integration products to connect these apps remained technical, complex, expensive and forbidding,” Vijay Tella, a co-founder and chief executive of Workato, a Mountain View, California software vendor, notes in a post on the company’s website.
Workato’s founding vision is to provide a single workflow automation “platform that enables companies to orchestrate data, processes, and user experience across the entire enterprise,” states Tella, 58-years-old. The platform enables a client’s systems, whether on premises or in the cloud, to connect to over 1,000 mobile apps instantly, without requiring any coding or development operations, the company says.
Since March 2020, with most employees working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for Workato’s software has grown rapidly as companies are forced to connect their systems and simplify work processes. Workato’s customers doubled in 2021 and now exceed 11,000. They are from various industries, including jeans maker Levi’s, software vendor Atlassian, movie producer MGM, Kaiser Permanante, a hospital system in California; New York University and semiconductor chip company Broadcom.
The potential enterprise automation market is estimated to be over $100 billion in size. Workato’s rapid growth in such a large market has venture capitalists (VCs) aggressively pitching Tella to invest in the company – typically its founders who pitch to hundreds of VCs trying to raise funds for their enterprise.
One VC firm, eager to invest in Workato during its latest funding round in November, interviewed 30 of its customers. Worried that a spate of such calls spammed and annoyed his customers, Tella called and even apologized to some of them, he told The New York Times.
In the November funding round, Workato raised $200 million at a valuation of $5.7 billion. This was a more than a three-fold jump in valuation from a previous $110 million funding round only ten months earlier. The latest round was led by Battery Ventures, an investment overseen by its senior partner Neeraj Agarwal. He joined the Boston-based fund in 2000. He holds a BS in computer science from Cornell and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Other investors in the latest round included venture capitalists Tiger Global, Norwest Ventures, with Promod Haque as senior managing partner, as well as venture funds run by software companies Salesforce, Workday, with Aneel Bhusri founder and CEO, and Servicenow.
Workato was co-founded in 2013 by Vijay Tella, Gautham Viswanathan, who is the vice president of product, and Harish Shetty, vice president of engineering. The three worked together earlier at Tibco, a database software company.
Workato is the fourth company co-founded by Tella, a serial entrepreneur. Earlier, in 2009 he co-founded and was CEO of Qik, a mobile video company. It was acquired by Skype, now part of Microsoft, in 2011.
He worked at Oracle, the software company, from 2003 to 2008. From 1997 to 2003, he was at Tibco, which he co-founded with Vivek Ranadive, the owner of the Sacramento Kings basketball team. From 1988 to 1997, Tella was at Teknekron Software Systems, which was acquired by Reuters, the news agency.
Tella earned an M.S. in computer science from UCLA in 1988 and a B.Tech. in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1986.
Over the next 18 months, Workato expects to be able to connect up to 10,000 applications. This follows its November 2021 acquisition, for an undisclosed amount, of Railsdata Software, which creates business applications connectors. Railsdata is a Chennai, India-based company. It was co-founded by Mohamed Rafiq, according to Crunchbase. He earned a B.Sc. in computer science from the Thiruthangal Nadar College, Chennai.
“Back in the day, automation was a complicated effort that required a lot of technology, infrastructure, processes, and tools,” Andy Nallappan, Chief Technology Officer at Broadcom, said in a statement. “But now, it’s as simple as a recipe thanks to Workato…(which) makes automation much more successful and frictionless.” Nallappan received a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Madras, India, in 1985, and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at El Paso, in 1991.
Workato’s automation software is not “replacing human work with software bots to reduce costs,” Tella states in a company post. Instead, he sees it as being part of automation revolutions which have “transcended efficiency to elevate human experience and establish completely new paradigms.” As an example he points out that “It was the invention of recorded sound (not the player piano or robot violinists)…that automated and transformed music.”
At the time, 19th century elites worried that “recorded sound would make musicians obsolete, pollute culture, and ruin art.” Today, the Recording Industry Association of America estimates that music contributes $170 billion annually to the US economy and supports over 2.4 million jobs. “The average person spends over 30 hours per week listening to music,” says Tella. “Recorded sound became a platform for untold technological innovations – from radio to YouTube. What a transformation of the human experience!”
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