Tray.io has raised $40 million to extend its Series C funding round to $90 million. The first part of its Series C was raised in November 2019, led by Meritech Capital, with participation from Spark Capital, GGV Capital, and True Ventures. The latest round sees Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) join the previous investors in raising funds to help the low-code cloud-first automation platform.
Alex Clayton, General Partner at Meritech Capital Partners, commented, “In volatile economic climates, the most promising companies need large viable markets, groundbreaking products, capable teams, outsized metrics, strong leadership positions and the ability to equip their customers to adapt to unpredictable conditions. Tray.io is a shining example, and we’re confident in the company’s sustainable business model. We are bullish on solutions for efficient business growth as a whole, and it is clear that Tray.io’s low-code, cloud-first approach to automation is a driver for business efficiency. We believe the best days for SaaS and the broader tech market are ahead, and our investment in Tray.io reflects this significant opportunity.”
Why the investment
The investment follows significant success for Tray.io, which has seen 115% revenue growth year over year. That growth was mainly driven by larger customers spending more than $100,000 ACV. Importantly the platform has also seen an increased usage with 444% more tasks running on it. Presumably over the last year, though Tray.io omitted the time period, making this less impressive. It would indicate that adoption is high, companies are using the platform and, therefore, less likely to churn.
Rich Waldron, Tray.io Co-founder and CEO, commented: “Digital transformation and the shift to the cloud has forced an evolution in enterprise architectures to take advantage of the scale, elasticity and economics now available, exposing the shortcomings of legacy approaches to iPaaS. Legacy products bring outdated constructs such as manual provisioning, limited scale, long development cycles and heavy maintenance. Our objective with this latest funding is to create a world where anyone in any department can solve business problems without the constraints of poorly adapted technology. By placing automation in the hands of each department rather than a limited few, the Tray way empowers people to transform their fragmented processes into powerful business outcomes and avoid being caught in the digital transformation backdraft.”
Waldron paints a strong vision of what he wants Tray.io to achieve. What he omits to mention is any reason why the massive delay between the two Series C announcements and why this wasn’t a Series D round. While Waldron does not say how he intends to achieve that vision, Tray.io is recruiting in its engineering function within the UK to extend the functionality to accomplish it. The release only states that they will invest the funding in product development and go-to-market initiatives. There is no indication that this will include geographical expansion outside of anglophone countries.
A new approach to Hyperautomation?
Tray.io no longer describes itself as an IPaaS vendor but instead seeks to leverage the new opportunity presented by Hyperautomation, the combination of integration and process automation. Gartner (requires an account) notes that the, “need for hyperautomation is creating a total software market opportunity that will reach $860 billion by 2025.”
The Tray.io solution aims to meet this requirement, helping organisations to connect SaaS applications across multiple clouds using a low-code platform with prebuilt connectors. It increases efficiency, eliminates manual processes within the organisation and reduces errors. The platform is scalable and enables different business departments to automate the workflows between systems. The use cases include streamlining Revenue Operations, fast-tracking HR onboarding, transforming finance quote to cash and automating IT user provisioning without developers needing to create and maintain integrations.
Zach Vance, Head of Platform Partnerships at Podium, commented, “At Podium our goal is to equip local businesses with easy-to-use tools so they can get more customers and deliver a better experience. Tray.io is our strategic platform for fueling over 45 apps and integrations in our Podium Marketplace, which powers communications for 100,000 businesses and reaches 1 in 2 mobile users in the US” saying, “Tray.io has been critical to accelerating our time-to-value for our busy local business customers, scaling billions of tasks and creating seamless end user experiences. It is exciting to witness Tray.io’s continued growth and we look forward to taking advantage of their new innovations that can enable Podium to deliver self-serve customer integrations at scale.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Is this a series D funding round in disguise? It is difficult to tell. However, Tray.io has attracted investments from an institutional investor rather than a pure venture capital partner. The CPP decision is interesting and unusual at this stage of life for a company. What is missing from the announcement is a new valuation for Tray.io and more of the numbers behind the company’s growth. Percentages without timescales are relatively meaningless. However, they must be impressive for the new investment to have occurred.
The next announcements will be more interesting for customers and prospects alike. What will the product roadmap look like now, and how is Tray.io planning to grow? Will it be organically, through acquisition and what about the international expansion?
Correction, The headline on this piece originally stated $50 million, which was incorrect, only $40 million was raised.