36Kr learned that the robot process automation service provider "Shadow Knife RPA" recently received a $50 million Series B financing, led by Coatue Management, and followed by old shareholders Hillhouse Venture Capital, GGV Jiyuan Capital, Red Dot China, and GSR Venture Capital; the funds were mainly used for product development and team expansion.
36Kr continues to pay attention to shadow knife RPA. Previously, Shadow Knife has completed four rounds of financing in one and a half years, including Initial Heart Capital and Yingdong Capital.
Shadow Knife's parent company Fork Intelligence was established in 2019, and the company mainly focuses on RPA's product research and development. The full name of RPA is Robot Process Automation, that is, machine process automation, which can be understood as a "virtual" robot on the business assembly line, replacing the manual completion of repetitive and tedious non-decision-making work such as daily logic and rules.
According to iResearch data, the market size of China's RPA industry in 2020 was nearly 2 billion yuan, an increase of 96% year-on-year, and the growth rate exceeded the global average. Due to the efficient and cost-saving than manual, the market prospects of the RPA market are generally promising.
Unlike traditional RPA services, which start from consulting and connect with customer operation and maintenance departments, customized products. The logic of the shadow knife is the brick-building process of enterprise business personnel, such as opening web pages, clicking on elements, etc., so that business personnel can directly design automated processes by dragging and dropping modules, saving most of the service costs of pre-consulting and post-operation and maintenance.
Schematic diagram of the "Shadow Knife RPA" process
If such an operation process is completed, the product needs to be easy to use and easy to operate. Jin Lijian told 36Kr that with the orientation of simplicity and ease of use, the shadow knife maintains a new rhythm of double-folding once every week, maintaining the original intention and focusing on every detail of the polished product. The company's R&D team accounts for more than 60% of the total number of people, and plans to expand to twice the existing number in the future. In addition to the product itself, Shadow Knife has also built a developer community to provide users with a platform for using tutorials and exchanging discussions.
In the underlying development, the bottom layer of the shadow knife adopts various types of automated framework technology and a variety of algorithms such as image and text recognition to locate elements, and then the massive element positioning data based on precipitation in the middle is used for automated algorithm iteration and automatic correction ability improvement, maintaining the stability of program operation in the rapidly changing e-commerce industry.
The concept of product is king is also implemented in the business model of Shadow Knife. Generally speaking, RPA vendors will charge according to the number of deployed robots, robot design and platform management, and the product revenue accounts for only about 20%, while large enterprises have a large volume, high business process homogeneity, and strong ability to pay for IT systems.
Shadow Knife chose to focus on the e-commerce industry, serving more than 10,000 customers, including Decathlon, BabyCare, By-Health, Blue Moon, Belle, Baozun and other leading enterprises in various industries, and formed a set of RPA enterprise automation solutions with more than 600 scenarios and systematization. In addition to the e-commerce field, Yingdao has reached cooperation with more than 20 financial companies such as Hang Seng Electronics, and has more than 100 customers.
In terms of sales channels, Jin Lijian said that Shadow Knife did not put too much energy on marketing, more spontaneous promotion for users, the conversion cycle was about a month, and the renewal rate was close to 100%.
Jin Lijian revealed that the focus of the future is still the e-commerce industry, and it is planned to expand customers to 100,000 within two years. In terms of positioning, shadow knife will also strengthen product functions while reducing the threshold of use, and create a small white can also play and is suitable for the global market of human-machine collaboration desktop efficiency products.
Investor views
Kai Jiang, Head of Coatue China, said: "The global RPA market is undergoing a profound transformation from 're-implementation' to 'available to everyone'. One of the pain points of RPA is that IT departments cannot support the changing needs of business units at any time. Therefore, only by allowing front-line business personnel to quickly master RPA skills can we deploy RPA robots faster, better, and more. In the future, front-line business personnel will be the main battlefield for RPA vendors to compete. “
Edit | Liu Shiwu