Our Investment in Tonkean: The Building Blocks for Modern Ops Teams

We’re delighted today to announce our investment in Tonkean, whose no-code process orchestration platform equips modern ops teams with the tools they need to automate and optimize complex business workflows.

Tonkean’s explosion in popularity coincides with the rise inside companies of makers: problem-solvers whose job it is to build tools that increase operational excellence. We see their work everywhere, from Netflix (where employees use a homegrown tool called “Lumen” to track and chart business metrics) to Qualtrics (where the team uses “Odo” to unify internal ticketing requests across legal, HR and IT) and beyond. Great companies run atop a lattice of internally-developed tools, and while this code is rarely seen by customers it is vital to how the companies function.

Yet the developers required to write that code are in short supply.  In a setting where less than 1% of the population can code, Tonkean expands—by an order of magnitude—the population of makers inside organizations able to leverage software to be technologically innovative. For enterprises committed to product excellence both outwardly and inwardly, Tonkean provides the building blocks for ops teams to create seamless internal experiences.

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Behind these marquee examples and for nearly every company we work with there is a never-ending pipeline of processes waiting to be automated.  Issuing, editing and filing an NDA; detecting fraudulent activity, alerting a risk officer and freezing a problematic account; creating a customer record and updating relevant information for all downstream systems.  To keep pace with these growing backlogs companies are ramping hiring across business ops, sales ops, IT ops, legal ops, marketing ops and beyond.  Against this backdrop we think Tonkean will be the operating system for this next wave of employees.  Companies no longer just build code for customers; companies are built on code themselves—Tonkean packs this code into a powerful orchestration platform so that non-technical makers can tie together people, systems and processes with ease.    

Through our work with UiPath we have seen firsthand the transformative impact of robotic process automation on workforces worldwide.  CEO & Founder Daniel Dines defined the market for enterprise automation by bringing simplicity to high velocity / low variability processes.  As UiPath grows in value and influence, Tonkean solves a next-order set of problems around human-in-the-loop / high variability processes. Both companies will drive forward the important theme of intelligent automation, and we’re thrilled to have several of our friends at UiPath investing with us in this round.  

Just as UiPath paved the way for the intelligent enterprise, so Tonkean is shaping the future of the composable enterprise – in which business users are equipped with a cadre of flexible building blocks to design their own solutions, customize their own workflows and extend their existing tooling. Already we see the platform processing millions of workflows per week at some of the world’s most innovative and fastest-growing companies, like Google, Instacart and Eversana.  We’re certain this is only the beginning.      

We were drawn to Sagi Eliyahu and his team from our very first interactions, and are excited to partner with them for the journey ahead.  Along with Joanne at Foundation and Raviraj at Lightspeed, as well as our friends Scott Farquhar, EricYuan, Eric Schmidt and a group of world-class operators from Atlassian, Dropbox, UiPath and more, we can’t wait to get to work.