AI-based workflow automation platform Nanonets has raised $29 million in new funding.
The company’s Series B round, announced Tuesday (March 12), comes as roughly a third of Fortune 500 countries have used Nanonet’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based workflow automation for finance, accounting, operations and other uses.
“The internet was going to kill paper but businesses today are producing more documents than ever, just in new forms,” such as emails, PDF contracts and white papers, Sarthak Jain, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said in a news release.
“There are millions of highly skilled professionals stuck looking for needles in haystacks and entering this data from these documents into different software. We are taking the most repetitive and mundane office work and automating it.”
The bulk of Nanonets’ revenue comes from automating finance processes like accounts payable (AP) and reconciliation, the release said. While an invoice might take 15 minutes to process manually, the company said it can reduce this work to under a minute.
The funding comes as small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are lagging in their adoption of automated AP and accounts receivable (AR) tasks, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Accounts Payable and Receivable Trends: What’s Next in Automation.”
That report, a collaboration with American Express, found that barely 5% of SMBs have automated all AP processes, and a similar share have done so with AR tasks.
“Although the goal of full automation is a long way off for many companies, more than a third of those that have not yet automated any AP or AR processes plan to do so in the near future,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this year. “Partial automation may still bring companies significant benefits in their daily business.”
Meanwhile, experts have told PYMNTS again and again that AI should be seen as a way to enhance or augment the work done by humans, and not replace it.
“We are in that economic cycle where every cost you can beat out of the process is necessary right now … how to save money and how to eliminate those manual steps in the process is top of mind,” Ingo Payments CEO Drew Edwards said in an interview.
“AI is going to be an imperative for every company, and what you do with AI is what will differentiate your products,” Heather Bellini, president and chief financial officer at InvestCloud, told PYMNTS in an interview last summer. “Functionally, it might get rid of a lot of the manual work people don’t want to do anyway and extract them up to a level where they can do more things that have a direct impact on the business.”
For all PYMNTS B2B coverage, subscribe to the daily B2B Newsletter.