Beijing-based tech startup Laiye, an intelligent automation company, has just announced that it has raised $160 million in Series C funding. The investment round includes the latest tranche at $70 million led by HOPU Magnolia, a high-growth enterprise technology-focused investment firm.
The other investors that participated in the round include VMS Group and Youshan Capital alongside participation from existing investors such as Lightspeed China Partners and US-based Lightspeed Venture Partners that invested in Rattle and lemon.markets.
Expansion plans
This funding round follows Laiye’s recent acquisition of Paris-based Mindsay, a leading European enterprise conversation AI firm, and the establishment of a new R&D hub in Paris. The startup plans to deploy the proceeds of the round to accelerate expansion in the APAC, the Americas and EMEA. Also, it will focus on growing its team As per Laiye, these regions represent the largest growth opportunity, where legacy Robotic Process Automation systems often leave businesses struggling to transform complex processes.
Guanchun Wang, Chairman and CEO of Laiye said: “We envision a future where all organisations and people are transformed, emboldened and made better by the power of intelligent automation. An AI-enabled digital workforce developed from Laiye’s integrated intelligent automation platform will help our customers accelerate their digital transformation journey. This new round of funding will continue to fuel our relentless product innovation and triple-digit YoY revenue growth in the years to come.”
Ronen Lamdan, CEO of Laiye International, said: “At Laiye, we are striving to fulfil our mission of harnessing intelligent automation technology to liberate workers from mundane tasks, enhance workplace efficiency, and transform businesses at speed and scale. This latest round of financing will accelerate our business growth and enable us to serve more large enterprises, government organisations, and SMEs across the world.”
HOPU Magnolia is the lead investor in this round, and Gunther Hamm, Co-Head of HOPU Magnolia, said: “HOPU Magnolia is thrilled to partner with Laiye, a leader in Intelligent Automation. We have known and tracked Laiye’s progress closely since it was founded, and have watched it grow from strength to strength serving mid-market and global enterprises. It has fully established its business model and is rapidly growing its revenue and customer base.”
“HOPU Magnolia, as HOPU’s dedicated growth fund, seeks to help emerging businesses further accelerate their growth through access to HOPU’s unparalleled resources. We are excited to help Laiye grow its business with core customers from across our unrivalled network of banks and large enterprises,” said Jacqueline Zhang, Co-Head of HOPU Magnolia.
Vanessa Lee, Managing Director & Head of TMT and Consumer of VMS Group’s Private Equity Division, said: “We are very excited about the achievements of Laiye and the rapid growth of its global team. VMS is committed to investing in companies with breakthrough technologies and high growth potential, and we see Laiye becoming the world leader in intelligent automation transformation.”
Redefines future of Intelligent Automation
Founded in 2015 by Guanchun Wang, Ji Gu and Yichuan Hu in Beijing, Laiye is a global company powering the future of Intelligent Automation with its wide-ranging IA software solutions. The company helps businesses solve their digital transformation challenges and scale their digital workforce. The company’s AI interactive platform that offers consumers and enterprises with intelligent assistant products developed with natural language processing, multi-turn dialog management, and context-based recommendation technologies.
The company’s main product, Wulai, enables enterprises to build chatbots. It also aims to help enterprise customers improve sales revenue, marketing ROI, and service efficiency through a business messaging and conversation solutions.
Laiye is working with enterprise customers in the insurance, communications, electric power, finance, retail, and healthcare industries to build end-to-end Intelligent Automation solutions. Its global customers include Porsche, LVMH, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson Medical, and Roche Pharmaceuticals. Laiye provides Intelligent Automation solutions to Chinese companies such as China Southern Power Grid, PetroChina, Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China Unicom, China Mobile, and China Telecom.
Albert Lu, Head of Market Access and Innovation Digitalisation at Johnson & Johnson, said: “Laiye has successfully implemented our conversational AI which helped to streamline and improve our communication with customers, making it more efficient, personalised, and cost-effective. Continuous data accumulation and mining enhance our chatbots’ accuracy, thus improving our ability to serve our customers.”
