German RPA consultancy Roboyo lands €21 million investment

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) consultancy Roboyo has raised €21 million in funding from growth capital specialist firm MML Capital.

Since launching in 2015, Roboyo has fast accumulated a market share in the global RPA landscape. The three co-founder – former management consultants Nicolas Hess, Christian Voigt and Sven Manutiu – came together to establish the firm after noting that RPA sales across the world were doubling each year.

Roboyo positions itself as a specialised implementation partner, starting from the advice phase where strategic automation opportunities are identified, all the way to the development and implementation phase of RPA solutions. Half a decade on from starting, the founders appear to be sitting pretty in a booming RPA market.

Global RPA software developers such as UiPath, Blue Prism and ABBYY all fall within Roboyo’s partnership roster, and the firm helps RPA adopters across Europe and the world with designing and deploying these solutions. Clients span the financial services, automotive, manufacturing, healthcare and retail sectors, among a range of others.

Nicolas Hess pointed out that most organisations nowadays have a use case for RPA. “Many companies are fully automated in the factories, but many processes in the back office are still running as they were 30 years ago,” he said to Handelsblatt. Supporting modernisation, Roboyo currently operates with a team of 120 professionals across six geographies, including its headquarters in Nuremberg and other offices in Europe and the US.

“We are a global company and want to become number one in our segment in the future,” said Hess. A significant €21 million raised in Series A funding from London-based MML Capital Partners will certainly help Roboyo along towards this goal. The funding was facilitated by corporate finance firm Alantra, which works closely with MML and other funding partners.

According to Director at Alantra Simon Roberts, RPA's wide applications make it a market to watch out for. “RPA is one of the fastest-growing software sub-sectors and is expected to receive significant attention over the coming years as businesses look to increase their RPA adoption and develop their digital transformation strategies,” he said.

While Covid-19 has done much to squeeze the funds floating around, it certainly hasn’t harmed the demand for RPA services, as businesses have been driven to realise just how far they have to go on their digitalisation journey. “We had the best months in our history,” said Hess, describing the Covid-19 crisis and all the ensued.

According to Christian Voigt, investors are aware of this trend, which put Roboyo in a good position when seeking funding. "We had a choice of investment partners and we chose MML because of their unique partnership approach and our shared vision on the future opportunities for the intelligent automation market,” he said.

Sven Manutiu, meanwhile, indicated that the money will be used to fund expansion in scope and geographical reach. “With this investment, we will be able to support more customers in more territories as a partner in their transformation into the digital age. In MML we have found the right partner to further accelerate our business and to attract the best talent in the market,” he said.