Mimica Secures £4.4 million from Khosla Ventures to Bring Profitable Automation to the World’s Businesses

Mimica, a software company building AI that learns to automate repetitive computer tasks, has announced a £4.4 million Series A funding from Khosla Ventures. This new investment adds to the seed investment from Entrepreneur First and Episode 1 and will help to further the company’s growth by establishing a sales team in the US and multiplying its investment in R&D.

Mimica’s first product, Mapper, is the market leader in a new category of tools called “process discovery”, which learn patterns from employee clicks and keystrokes and generate process maps that have historically been created by business analysts through manual effort.

Today, Mimica Mapper supports robotic process automation (RPA) teams, who build software bots that complete repetitive tasks such as data entry, form completion and claim and ticket processing – a market estimated to be worth $107 billion by 2027. According to McKinsey, 69 percent of data processing and 64 percent of data collection activities could feasibly be automated. RPA teams use process maps to identify opportunities for automation and create blueprints for the software bots.

RPA has showed slowing growth this year, with the market leader, UiPath (NYSE: PATH) down more than 30 percent. Mimica argues RPA’s adoption is being bottlenecked by the highly manual aspects of its deployment. Large enterprises have tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and business processes and identifying feasible opportunities for automation poses a significant challenge for buyers. Bot development is equally slow and error-prone due to the complexity of the processes being automated.

Mimica’s AI removes these bottlenecks by automatically discovering opportunities for automation and generating accurate process maps for bots that significantly accelerate development. RPA teams use Mimica to unlock a fivefold increase in the number of bots deployed on an annual basis. In the future, Mimica will automatically generate RPA code, thereby realising its vision of building AI that can mimic humans.

Mapper’s AI uses proprietary advancements in NLP, computer vision and unsupervised learning to surface relevant process actions while hiding noise, and anonymises all recorded data, so no confidential or personally identifiable information is persisted. It is available as a cloud or on-premise solution, and is both GDPR and CCPA compliant.

Mimica is also announcing the launch of a new discovery tool, Miner, which helps enterprises to identify new automation opportunities. It conducts a broad sweep across tens of thousands of employees and ranks their tasks by automatability. Already successfully piloted by AT&T, Miner provides the shortlist for automation before Mapper turns it into a reality, creating the business process maps that the RPA bots need to do their work.

With more than three years of R&D behind its breakthrough product, Mimica is now generating revenue from its first clients and is now actively targeting enterprises in industries with high automation potential such as banking, financial services, telecoms and manufacturing.

To support the product development and global expansion, the new investment will be used to scale the Mimica team from 15 to 50 over the next two years. This includes hiring a US-based Head of Sales, and various roles across engineering, data science, sales and marketing in both the UK and US.

CEO Tuhin Chakraborty and CTO Raphael Holca-Lamarre co-founded Mimica in 2017. Holca-Lamarre did a PhD in computational neuroscience and machine learning, developing the technical insights at the core of Mimica over a decade of research at McGill, ETH, and TU Berlin. Chakraborty studied machine learning at Stanford and earned a patent for a supervised learning model he developed at LinkedIn. Senior Data Scientist Matthew Frampton has over a decade of research experience in NLP and bioinformatics, and at Stanford he developed what later became Apple’s AI assistant, Siri.

Since launching in 2020, Mimica has converted 100 percent of its pilots, including Dell, AT&T, Hexaware, Experis and Ironbridge. For Dell, Mimica reduced the lead time for bot deployments by 65 percent, equivalent to three times more automation per year.

Chakraborty said, “RPA is the perfect beachhead for our tech because buyers experience so much pain after their purchases. It’s torture, digging for automation opportunities and building process maps by hand, and it’s unnecessary. Mimica is loved by Dell and AT&T because it does the work faster and more accurately, across tens of thousands of employees. With Khosla Ventures’ investment we’ll bring our tech to the rest of the Fortune 500 and take the next big steps in our product roadmap. Soon we’ll be generating bots automatically, on the march toward entrusting AI with the world’s monotonous digital work.”

“We invested in Mimica because the founding team has a terrific combination of deep technical expertise in building AI systems, and a thorough understanding of the challenges faced by an enterprise when managing processes.” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “Mimica’s AI-based technology addresses the biggest challenges in automating business processes, and therefore we believe Mimica is positioned to become the dominant automation solution. I look forward to assisting Tuhin in making Mimica wildly successful.”

“Mimica’s approach can near-autonomously turn noisy clicks and keystrokes, across teams of users, into highly accurate process blueprints with the right level of abstraction.” added Kanu Gulati of Khosla Ventures. “I am thrilled Khosla Ventures is able to back Tuhin and Raphael and the incredibly strong team that they have assembled.”

Matt Clifford, co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, said, “We were fortunate to meet Tuhin and Raphael before Mimica even existed and it was clear from day one that they were exactly the kind of founders who have what it takes to build a globally important company: smart, determined and, above all, hugely ambitious. We’re delighted to see their them attract world-class backing to take Mimica to the next level.”

Damien Lane, co-founder and Partner, Episode 1, said, “We loved Tuhin and Raphael from the moment we first met them when they were raising their seed round and have loved working with them ever since.  What they are doing is hugely complex, but they have made enormous strides and we are thrilled to welcome Khosla to the Mimica team as they continue to build what we hope will be a category-defining business.”

For further information on Mimica visit https://mimica.ai/.