Tonkean, the leading robotic automation & management platform for business operations, today announced the completion of a $7.2 million seed round investment led by Foundation Capital with participation from Magma Venture Partners and Slow Ventures to solve the last-mile challenge in business operations. Joanne Chen, Partner at Foundation Capital, is joining the board of directors.

Tonkean brings human-in-the-loop robotic automation to enterprises. As an operating system for operations teams, Tonkean empowers business and functional operations managers to deploy custom bots without any code or development expertise. Employees only spend an average of 2.8 hours a day on high-value work, mainly due to the manual tasks and distractions from using too many systems and interfaces. The increase in specialized teams and processes has also made cross-functional coordination more challenging. This leads to tremendous drag on business operations that negatively impacts revenue, operating costs, and customer experience. The momentum in RPA has demonstrated an appetite from enterprises to address inefficiencies through automation. However, the lack of focus on people in designing processes with automation has left a gap in realized impact. By taking a people-first approach to automation, Tonkean introduces the next generation of robotic automation and helps automate processes end-to-end by bridging the gap between systems and people.

"The key to unlocking true value with automation is by thinking people-first," says Sagi Eliyahu, co-founder and CEO of Tonkean. "By automating processes with humans-in-the-loop, you allow people to focus on what matters while still ensuring business needs are being met."

Leveraging context-aware automation, AI-driven people coordination, and 1,000+ system connectors, Tonkean automates the administrative tasks and coordination work inherent in business processes, such as updating records, moving data between systems, or following up with people on action items and projects. Tonkean bots partner with people by intelligently reaching out to them in their platforms of choice to simplify work and ensure people don't become the bottleneck in business processes.

"Tonkean is a strategic part of our business operations, giving us the flexibility to scale processes while meeting our constantly evolving needs," says Stef Layne, VP and Chief of Staff at TripActions. "While we started off with automating customer support workflows, we are now beginning to leverage Tonkean to automate processes in multiple areas like people operations, IT, and strategic services."

The Tonkean platform drives higher revenue, efficiency gains, and improved customer experience with use cases across enterprise functions. Front-office processes like customer support triaging or lead qualification can be fully automated by connecting multiple systems and coordinating between customer-touching teams. Back-office processes like legal request intake, for example, can be fully delegated to a Tonkean bot that consolidates requests from across the business, auto-handles the responses, intelligently routes items to different teams, and provides visibility into critical KPIs.

Tonkean has also built out a growing technology partner portfolio including DocuSign, Zendesk, Intercom, Front and more. By allowing them to better connect and tailor their product workflows to each customer's unique environment and needs, Tonkean extends the value that software providers can deliver.

"The need to simplify and automate processes in modern-day enterprises is undeniable, and this is not just a systems problem," says Joanne Chen, Partner at Foundation Capital. "The talented team at Tonkean has introduced the next generation of automation that incorporates the unique attributes and behaviors of people."

"We are excited to have top-tier investment funds like Foundation, Magma and Slow joining us as we continue our mission of improving the way we work through automation," says Sagi, "and we are incredibly thankful to have the support of all of our early customers and advisors, as well as individuals like Sam Lessin, Kevin Mahaffey, Yuval Neeman and others, that helped us throughout our journey."

The new funding will support Tonkean's strategic growth and hiring initiatives as well as the continued development of its robotic automation & management platform.