An incredible wave of innovation, ubiquitous networking, the ability to use big data, the strength of advanced analytics, and the future potential of portable technology are all having a significant impact on every business environment. We are talking about enterprise automation, which is making a massive breakthrough in many organizations. The number of companies depending on automation speaks about the technology itself.
For business owners, complex data and other unsystematic information are of no help. That’s where enterprise automation comes into the picture. Thanks to this ingenious technology, companies can function systematically and analyze operational strategies to guarantee peak performance while searching for manual procedures that can be replaced with digital substitutes.
One such company that is regarded as one of the leading enterprise automation platforms is Workato. The firm was founded in 2013 and has its head office in Mountain View, California. In 2023, Workato has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service for five consecutive years. The company also received 4.9 ratings out of 5 on Gartner Peer Insights for its customer experience, with 450 releases delivered in the past 12 months.
Let’s check out Workato’s business and revenue model, its funding and investors, and its overall journey in this article.
Workato – Company Highlights
| Company Name | Workato |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Mountain View, California |
| Industry | Software Development |
| Founders | Vijay Tella, Gautham Viswanathan, Harish Shetty |
| Founded | 2013 |
| Website | workato.com |
Workato – About
Workato – Industry
Workato – Founders and Team
Workato – Startup Story
Workato – Mission and Vision
Workato – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Workato – Business Model
Workato – Revenue Model
Workato – Funding and Investors
Workato – Mergers and Acquisitions
Workato – Growth
Workato – Advertisements
Workato – Awards and Achievement
Workato – Competitors
Workato – Future Plans
Workato – About
Without sacrificing security and governance, Workato enables IT and business teams to integrate their apps and automate business workflows. It enables businesses to generate results from business events in real time. More than 11,000 of the biggest brands in the world, including Broadcom, Intuit, Box, Autodesk, and HubSpot, trust Workato because it was designed for business and IT users.
Workato enables both business and IT users to create workflow automation quickly by fusing an enterprise-grade workflow automation platform with the user-friendliness anticipated from consumer apps.
Workato – Industry
Workato belongs to the software development industry. This industry has emerged as a boon for many countries, such as India, the USA, etc. Recent research shows that the global software development market underwent significant expansion, with its value rising from $260.79 billion in 2022 to $334.86 billion in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 28.4%.
As new trends keep coming in this particular industry, it is only going to grow. Furthermore, it is expected that the global software development industry is going to reach $1159.2 billion by 2031.
Workato – Founders and Team
Workato was founded by three friends, Vijay Tella, Gautham Viswanathan, and Harish Shetty in 2013.
Vijay Tella
Vijay Tella obtained his bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. After completing his graduation, he got his Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. For more than 25 years, he has overseen the development of market-leading integration technologies.
Vijay Tella’s career started at Teknekron Software Systems (now acquired by Reuters), where he was employed for nine years. He served as the CEO of Qik, a consumer video communications company that was acquired by Skype, before joining Workato. Besides this, he helped create two multibillion-dollar integration products before Qik.
Vijay was also a member of the founding team and served as SVP, of Engineering until TIBCO went public. He then participated in the 2005 launch of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware platform as its Chief Strategy Officer.
Harish Shetty
Harish Shetty is the co-founder and also serves as the SVP of Engineering at Workato. Prior to co-founding Workato, he served as the engineering director for two SaaS businesses. Earlier, he served as the lead architect and director of engineering for TIBCO’s BusinessWorks, ActiveMatrix, and Tibbr products. Harish has a degree in Engineering, Electronics, and Communications from the University of Mysore.
Gautham Viswanathan
Besides co-founding Workato, Gautham also serves as the Chief Product Officer at Workato. As a founding member of the TIBCO team, Gautham held several leadership positions in the company’s engineering, product marketing and management, and corporate development departments for more than 12 years. Following TIBCO, Gautham co-founded Blink Interactive and served as the CEO of iProfile.
Workato – Startup Story
The three co-founders of Workato founded the company intending to bring automation to business workflows. The idea came to Vijay Tella as an early employee of Teknekron, where he contributed to the development of the first software-based integration middleware called The Information Bus (TIB). He first met Gautham at TIBCO, where he developed the industry-standard enterprise integration software BusinessWorks, which continues to serve as a template for the majority of the current iPaaS platforms.
After dealing with their personal career experiences, Vijay and Gautham reconnected. Co-founder, Gautham emphasized that when it came to today’s apps and cloud-based services, the integration problem that they had thought it had expertly solved at TIBCO was not really addressed.
After a deep understanding of integration problems, the founders assembled an integration dream team by 2012 that was guided by two main tenets: first, business users leading digital transformation initiatives shouldn’t have to sacrifice the quality, features, and power of the platform they select; and second, big businesses, even Fortune 500 companies, shouldn’t be forced to deal with complicated, time-consuming, and expensive software.
Workato – Mission and Vision
The mission of Workato is to assist businesses in integrating and automating at least 10X faster than with conventional tools and at a tenth of the cost.
Workato – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Workato goes by the motto, “automate the work out of everything”
Their tagline speaks about their main object, which is what they do and who they are. To be precise, their tagline states what they offer and about their services.
The logo of the company is designed by one of their team’s UX designers, Xiuying Zhang. The logo of Workato stands out as a fresh, contemporary interpretation of the W, showing flow through the large, angular curves and the endpoints through the ball at the very end.
Workato – Business Model
Workato is a B2B SaaS-based company. The business model of Workato is about creating powerful automation and workflows.
The most important aspect of Workato is Workato Recipes, which is a powerful yet simple approach that helps to automate complex data. A recipe is a set of instructions that a user develops to finish work between two or more apps. These building blocks can work with multiple apps and app instances, detect and remove duplicate records, detect errors automatically, roll back transactions, and ensure that every event is delivered, no matter what. In essence, a Workato recipe can be as simple or as complex as customers would like it to be, with multiple steps, data manipulation, workflows, and business logic embedded, handling challenges associated with user input, and much more.
The company has also borrowed a page from GitHub to provide a platform for their customers to easily share their problems. It is a robust community of users, partners, citizen developers, and integration experts who regularly share their recipes. Today, the company has over 100,000 public recipes and is also witnessing the theory come to life as the majority of their customers find recipes that satisfy their needs in the community, copy them, adapt them slightly to fit their preferences, and then share them with the rest of the community.
Workato offers its services for the HR, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Support, IT, Product, and Revenue Operations sectors.
Workato’s specialties include:
- Integration
- Workflow Automation
- Automation
- Intelligent Automation
- Business Process Automation
- App Integration
- Cloud App Integration
- Ground App Integration
- Enterprise Integration
- Citizen Development
- No Code Integration
- Enterprise Web
- Information Technology
- Artificial Intelligence
Workato – Revenue Model
Workato earns money through the different pricing mediums it sets for each business or IT company as per their requirements. As the industry leader in the automation platform, Workato’s total valuation stood at $5.7 billion in 2021.
Workato – Funding and Investors
Till now (March 2023), Workato has raised a total funding of $415 million. The details are given below:
| Date | Funding Round | Amount Raised | Lead Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 10, 2021 | Series E | $200 million | Battery Ventures |
| Jan 12, 2021 | Series D | $110 million | Altimeter Capital, Insight Partners |
| Nov 7, 2019 | Series C | $70 million | Redpoint |
| Dec 5, 2018 | Series B | $25 million | Battery Ventures |
| Jul 17, 2017 | Series A | $10 million | Storm Ventures |
Workato is also funded by two more investors: Tiger Global Management and Geodesic Capital.
Workato – Mergers and Acquisitions
Workato has acquired RailsData on November 10, 2021. RailsData is an India-based Ruby on rails and big data development company for an undisclosed amount.
Workato – Growth
Since its inception, Workato has emerged as the leading enterprise automation platform. In 2021, Workato revealed its ranking on the 27th annual Deloitte Technology Fast 500, a list of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and energy tech companies in North America. The company was placed 153rd overall and 43rd in the Bay Area. Additionally, Workato grew 739% from 2018 to 2021.
Workato – Advertisements
In 2019, Workato posted an advertisement based on their automation services. The ad spoke about how their automation platform can help customers handle complicated and critical integrations through thousands of apps and address a complex workflow with ease while maintaining security and governance.
Workato – Awards and Achievement
Workato has achieved the following awards and recognitions:
- Workato was recognized as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service
- Workato was recognized as a CNBC Disruptor, launching the first Automate World Tour
- Workato has been listed in Deloitte Technology Fast 500 rankings in 2021
- Listed in the Forbes Cloud 100 rankings
Workato – Competitors
Some of the top competitors or alternatives of Workato are:
- SAP
- Zapier
- Azure
- Boomi
- MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform
- Celigo
- TIBCO Cloud Integration
- SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform
PV Vyshnavi
Workato – Future Plans
Workato has newly launched a renewed and improved version of its community platform. The new Systematic Community contains a fresh, vibrant look, updated programming, moderator responses to technical questions, a job board, a private vendor evaluation hub, and more. It also has a new user interface with leaderboards and badges. With this new launch, Workato aims to enhance mobility between the community, the Workato product itself, and its education platform, the Automation Institute under one roof.
Workato – FAQs
What does Workato do?
Workato enables both business and IT users to create workflow automation quickly by fusing an enterprise-grade workflow automation platform with the user-friendliness anticipated from consumer apps.
When was Workato founded?
Workato, headquartered in Mountain View, California, was founded in 2013.
Who founded Workato?
Workato was founded by Vijay Tella, Gautham Viswanathan, and Harish Shetty.
Who are Workato’s top competitors?
Some of the top competitors of Workato include Zapier, SAP, Azure, Boomi, MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, Celigo, TIBCO Cloud Integration, and SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform.
