
Shunwei leads $10m round for China RPA player

Naturobot, a China-based robotic process automation (RPA) start-up, has raised a new round amounting to about USD 10m led by Shunwei Capital.
Picus Capital, listed cyber-security company Sunyard Technology, and Eminence Ventures came in as new investors, while GL Ventures re-upped, according to a statement.
Naturobot was founded in 2021 by Lifeng Li who previously led the product and technology development for Alibaba Cloud’s RPA unit.
The company combines RPA with artificial intelligence, cloud-native features, and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The goal is to provide services that go beyond the basic RPA concept which typically involves efficiency gains derived from staff using a new tool. Naturobot envisages an automation solution that fully replaces manual labour.
The company currently covers more than 1,000 business scenarios including sales, finance, human resources, customer service, and daily enterprise operations. It claims to be the only RPA product integrated with the leading three Chinese cooperative software services – WeChat Enterprise, Alibaba's Dingtalk, and ByteDance's Lark.
Naturobot highlights Misumi, an industrial parts procurement platform, as a user case study. Previously, sales staff working remotely were unable to ascertain real-time prices for products because they couldn't access the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Through WeChat Enterprise, Naturobot delivered information to mobile devices, enhancing customer acquisition efforts.
There is a clear industry trend to extend RPA to so-called “hyper-automation,” which involves combining various tools to enable full automation of organisations. Between now and 2026, the market hyper-automation-related software will see compound annual growth of 11.9%, reaching nearly USD 1.04trn, according to Gartner.
In China's hyper-automation space, CDH recently led a Series B round of nearly CNY 200m (USD 29.2m) for 1Data, which provides software to logistics specialists and supply chain managers.
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