This announcement was released in partnership with Laiye.
BEIJING—Laiye, China’s leader in intelligent automation, announced today it has raised USD 50 million in series C+ funding in a round jointly led by Ping An Global Voyager Fund and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Equity Investment Fund, with participation from Lightspeed China Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital China, and Wu Capital.
Over the past year, Laiye has accomplished several milestones through its innovative product offerings and fast-developing ecosystem. Laiye accelerated its international expansion despite the pandemic and is now serving a growing customer base that consists of numerous Fortune 500 companies, governmental organizations, and SMBs. Laiye’s annual RPA (robotics process automation) software subscription revenue soared with an impressive 900% year-on-year growth. The intelligent automation vendor’s conversational AI product, Laiye Chatbot, also continued to garner favorable responses from the user community. These successes are in line with Laiye achieving positive cash flow for its enterprise business and profitability for its chatbot business in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Li Wei, co-CEO and president of Laiye, stated that this round of funding will be primarily applied towards global expansion and product development to help businesses achieve end-to-end intelligent automation. Laiye aims to enhance its RPA offering with native AI capability, compatibility with more operating systems like Linux and Android, and deployability on all major cloud platforms. The company will keep recruiting top talent to develop industry-specific solutions and strengthen its developer and partner ecosystem.
Laiye’s current global footprint spans Asia, the US, and Europe with international partners including Microsoft, Deloitte, KPMG, and Digital China. Also, Laiye has successfully established its new overseas office in Singapore to serve as its headquarters in the Asia Pacific region. In its ongoing expansion, Laiye will seek to partner with prominent enterprises in Southeast Asia, and be cognizant of the expectations and technological trends prevalent in local regions in order to ensure its solutions are relevant to the target markets.
Jonathan Larsen, Ping An Group chief innovation officer and CEO of Ping An Global Voyager Fund, which led this round, said, “Laiye has established itself as a clear leader in China in an extremely fast-growing and attractive space. Laiye’s solutions have particular resonance with financial institutions, which in China are generally just beginning to reap the rewards of RPA applications. Ping An is excited to partner with Laiye to help take it to the next phase of its growth story.”
Wu Wei, managing director of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Equity Investment Fund, Laiye’s latest investor, commented, “Laiye has deep roots in RPA as well as AI technologies like deep learning, NLP, and multi-modal interaction. Coupled with the capability to effectively land in-depth and comprehensive solutions, they can help organizations efficiently build up their intelligent tools and business process solutions. We will continue supporting Laiye to enable more industry players in Shanghai and beyond to achieve successful digital transformation.”
James Mi, a founding partner at Lightspeed China, which has been one of Laiye’s earliest investors, said, “Since our investment in Laiye in the seed round, we have witnessed Laiye’s growth towards becoming China’s leader in intelligent automation and building China’s biggest developer community and partner ecosystem.”
Laiye currently has an expansive community with over 400,000 developers and more than 500 partners, primarily in China. The company is quickly broadening its community outside China through partners like Samart Raaspal in Thailand.
Wang Guanchun, chairman and CEO of Laiye, said, “Laiye has been growing its developer community by organizing RPA+AI competitions and launching a bot store that connects SMBs with automation needs to freelancing developers. Laiye aims to foster the world’s largest developer community for software robots and build the world’s largest bot marketplace in the next three years. And we plan to certify at least 1 million software robot developers by 2025. We believe that digital workforce and intelligent automation will reach all walks of life as long as more human workers can be upskilled with knowledge in RPA and AI.”
About Laiye
Laiye has rich experience in RPA + AI and helps businesses and people realize their full potential by optimizing the human-machine collaborative alliance with sophisticated, dynamic, productivity-enhancing digital, low-code “workforce solutions.” Laiye delivers the deepest, most advanced AI/RPA/NLP solutions to help businesses become more efficient, effective, agile, and successful. And it frees people to focus on meaningful, innovative, mission-critical initiatives.
Core technologies include robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, natural language processing (NLP), conversational intelligence, text recognition, and image recognition.