Spearheading innovation in back-office logistics and e-commerce-related processes with artificial intellegence, San Francisco-based Parabola has clinched a solid $24 million in a Series B funding venture. The funding was led by OpenView, with additional support from Matrix, Thrive, Good Friends, Webflow, and Flexport acting as a strategic investor; Additionally, Otherwise Fund, Abstract Ventures, and Merus Capital also participated in the round. The firm has garnered a cumulative funding of $34.2 million, including the latest influx of capital.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Parabola, Alex Yaseen acknowledges the fruitfulness of the raised investment and further emphasizes the company's intention to ramp-up employment options and invigorate its product research and development endeavors. Against the backdrop of most companies grappling with pandemic-induced adversities, Parabola managed to carve out a success story, as per Yaseen's announcement.
Parabola's core offering is an AI-integrated platform for streamlining various workflows. With this tool clients can carry data from a variety of formats, such as PDFs, emails, images, text message logs. Thereafter, the platform categorizes, enriches, or standardizes these data points.
In real-world applications, a dataset in form of a list of product names could be automically filtered through Parabola into distinct categories like clothing, electronics, grocery and home goods. Likewise, it can process inconsistently formatted invoices and extract vital details such as invoice amount and due date. One of the other key functions is tracking Amazon keyword rankings within a specific timeframe, assisting e-commerce businesses in a bid to improve product listing optimization.
Parabola, in essence, is a collaborative data tool for users without deep technical knowledge who previously had to rely on spreadsheets or time-intensive manual processes. Key to their selling point, according to Yaseen, is that the solutions designed by Parabola empower operation teams to build their own solutions without being reliant on data and IT bottlenecks. This eliminates the need for developers to write code to address each rapid change in the automation workflow.
The allure of cost savings seems to be a driving factor for many organizations; a reported 66% of organizations in a recent Mckinsey survey responded affirmatively to trialling process automation across various business functions. Going by a UiPath survey, businesses can potentially shave off about $1.5 million per year from their expenses by implementing automation into at least part of their processes.
This burgeoning trend has witnessed a crop of new solution providers like Zapier, Workato, Tray and MuleSoft as well as internal-tool-builders like Retool and AppMaster. The successful journey of Retool illustrates this growing trend, having recently raised $45 million at a staggering $3.2 billion valuation.
The value proposition of Parabola, says Yaseen, lies in their ability to build more logic and less dependence on merely shifting data across different systems, standing out even among well-funded competitors. While many users still prefer traditional methods because they're familiar, Parabola taps into this pain point. They assert that enterprise leaders should not exhaust valuable technical resources for projects that can be automated otherwise.
Boasting a versatile client base operating across industries like e-commerce, retail, shipping and logistics, Parabola currently aids over 500 brands in their workflow automation. Having a team size of 30, the startup plans to accelerate its headcount to about 60 by the close of the current year.
