KYP.ai, a European productivity optimization software startup founded in Cologne, Germany almost exactly five years ago, has announced a Series A fundraising round of nearly $18.7 million USD (€17.5 million Euros) led by OTB Ventures, with participation from existing backers 42CAP and US-based investor, Tola Capital.

“Today is an important milestone for KYP.ai as we are scaling our business globally,” said Adam Bujak, KYP.ai’s CEO and co-founder, in a press release. “We look forward to partnering with our new and existing investors to deliver our productivity 360 vision to customers in new markets and continue to enable business leaders to make deeply informed and responsive decisions to drive value and cost savings as they navigate the current business environment. ”

With the money, KYP.ai plans to scale up in the U.S. and expand its existing large customer bases in Europe and Asia, including helping its clients adopt new generative AI models, apps, agents and tools.

The company serves clients across a wide array of sectors, including technology, insurance, healthcare, utilities, business process outsourcing (BPO) and logistics, all with its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

What KYP.ai’s ‘Productivity 360°’ offers to enterprises

KYP.ai’s signature software platform for clients is called “Productivity 360°,” and is essentially a secure web app management tool for understanding and helping to automate various business tasks.

As the company writes on its website, the Productivity 360° suite is “engineered to provide insights into not just processes, but also the people driving them and the technology enabling them.”

“Imagine having a tool that not only allows you to view your organization from a high vantage point but also enables you to zoom in on specifics whenever and wherever needed.”

The platform does this first through “process discovery,” using its proprietary AI algorithms to securely analyze a client company’s data infrastructure and all of the permutations that the data undergoes as it moves through the organization and its apps.

Screenshot of KYP.ai’s Productivity 360° app and process discovery screen. Credit: KYP.ai

Then KYP.ai’s tools identify blockages and inefficiencies that could be solved through automator tools, and suggests them to the client administrator.

Finally, it also provides a “heatmap” showing repetitive, tedious tasks within the organization — such as if employees are having to copy-and-paste from the same passages of documentation or code to fulfill their job functions — and displays this visually as an opportunity for automation to save time and money as well.

It sounds useful, and it is for the current clients, saving them an average of $2.7 million annually by increasing automation by an average 37% across the client base.

How Gen AI enters the picture

As an AI-based company in its own right, KYP.ai has been closely following the hype and interest among enterprise customers in new generative AI tools, technologies, and applications.

For years now, KYP.ai has already sought to help businesses adopt new AI models where it makes sense, and the latest and greatest such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT are no exception.

As the company explains on its website, KYP.ai helps its clients focus “on areas where there is substantial scalability and thus impact.”

“KYP.ai aids companies in seizing the low-hanging fruits in the Gen AI space and showing them precisely down to the process step and activity level what’s really in for them,” essentially acting as an informed consultant and resource for its clients hoping to get into the Gen AI game and use it to achieve efficiencies. In that sense, it may be competing directly in some ways with the raft of larger consultancies and agencies such as McKinsey and BCG that have recently partnered with leading foundation model AI providers to bring Gen AI to their enterprise clients.

Noteworthy clients across sectors

Among those already making use of KYP.ai’s Productivity 360º are notable firms including DHL, Mindsprint BPS, Hollard, Qinecsa, Allied Global and Alorica.

Mindsprint, itself a business services tech firm owned by Olam Group, turned to KYP.ai to help map upwards of 600 processes of more than 1,200 workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many went remote. Today, Mindsprint still relies on KYP.ai’s tech as its “mission-critical process tracking and improvement tool.”

The results are part of why OTB Ventures led the Series A, as it sees KYP.ai as critical to organizations, especially as hybrid/remote workforces and software processes grow across the board.

“The future lies in leveraging emerging tech to measure productivity, no matter the location,” said Adam Niewiński, Managing Partner and co-founder of OTB Ventures in the press release announcing the funding round. “That’s where KYP.ai steps in. Armed with real-time data, this AI-based platform empowers top executives to stay ahead of the competition and kickstarts a productivity revolution.”