Dec 2, 2023

Kognitos – a company developing generative AI for business automation – recently announced the closing of a $20 million Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Clear Ventures, Engineering Capital, and Wipro Ventures. This new round of funding brings the company’s total funding to $30 million – adding to the seed round closed earlier this year. Launched in 2020, the company aims to build a future where all business applications will be written in English, where machines understand human language natively, and where interacting with a computer is as easy as communicating with a human. AI has been driving the way business is conducted across all industries. And many of the traditional shortcomings of automation tools, including learning curve, cost, and time to value, are being addressed using the power of generative AI. Kognitos’ approach to automation – using a deterministic English interpreter removes the risk of hallucination and biases – while providing all the power of generative AI to business users. Organizations can now accelerate automation without the need for traditional automation skill sets. Many companies, including manufacturing, logistics, CPG, and retail, are using the product, such as PepsiCo, Wipro, Century Supply Chain Solutions, and Norco Industries. By enabling business users to use a language they already know, Kognitos reduces the burden on business users and IT, dramatically reducing costs while accelerating business. Most businesses now have document-heavy or coordination-heavy processes that are manual since automating them with traditional tools has been a daunting task. For example, a person in finance who processes a large variety of invoices, purchase orders, and contracts daily finds it hard to explain all the details of what they do to an RPA developer, especially all the edge cases. Even after automating such processes, the ballooning maintenance costs have failed in many projects. Kognitos utilizes natural language processing automation (NLPA) to enable business users to automate processes in plain human language – English is now “code.” And Kognitos offers a highly scalable bot-less and management-free SaaS platform that can run business processes targeting ERP, CRM, and standard business applications at scale. The company’s platform dynamically learns from the business users when they handle exceptions, further increasing value to the business without the expensive software development life-cycle as experienced in traditional automation tools. The new funding round will be used to enhance the platform’s ability to understand and execute complex business processes and expand partnerships and integrations with other business applications to improve the platform’s interoperability. These efforts aim to establish Kognitos as a leader in generative AI for business automation and increase the platform’s adoption. Along with the new capital, Kognitos also announced the immediate availability of Exception Center, a next-generation exception handling interface with the platform aimed at business users. Kognitos also unveiled multi-modal automation functions, including voice transcription, image comparison, image manipulation, QR code support, data visualization, and PDF form filling. KEY QUOTES: “For the last few decades we have been forcing humans to learn the language of the machine through various no-code, low code and RPA platforms. The time has come for the machine to natively understand plain English. No developer should be needed to translate business requirements into automation because now the business requirements become the automation.” Binny Gill, Founder and CEO of Kognitos “Every enterprise needs to embrace AI, and automation in human language will be key to widespread business usage. In Kognitos, we are backing a founder we have worked with before who is taking on a bold vision of empowering a billion people to program in natural language where every single business application can be written in English.” Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures “Working with Kognitos has helped us to automate extremely complex use cases that existing automation solutions on the market have been unable to handle. With the Kognitos AI solution, our team is empowered to automate and even handle unforeseen edge cases without increasing the demand on IT. We have realized significant productivity gains and further enhanced our VIZIV Supply Chain Optimization Platform by using Kognitos to develop a market leading AI-powered capability within our business. We look forward to expanding our partnership with Kognitos as we become the AI leader in the Global logistics space.” Jim McCullen, CIO at Century Supply Chain Solutions Sponsors