Zenaton, a cloud-based developer tool startup that makes building workflows easy, today announced a €2 million seed investment led by Accel and Point Nine Capital, with participation from the Slack Fund, Kima Ventures, and business angels including Julien Lemoine, CTO and co-founder of Algolia, and Francis Nappez, CTO and co-founder of BlaBlaCar. The Paris-based Zenaton team founded the company in 2017.
Most businesses have coded workflows governing how their users interact with their service or automating internal tasks. For example, ordering an item on an ecommerce website will trigger a workflow that steers the process through specific steps, from order fulfillment through delivery and customer follow-up. These workflows are typically coded by developers from scratch, a lengthy and painful endeavor, or with complex, cumbersome third-party tools.
Gilles Barbier and Louis Cibot, motivated by the frustration of facing this problem in their previous companies, worked on different solutions for months before finding a new way for developers to build, run and scale workflows in an easy and resilient way, all while using their preferred programming language. They started Zenaton in September 2017 to further develop this technology and bring it to developers and businesses worldwide.
Today, by using Zenaton startups can have the workflow quality of an Amazon or Uber without the need for hundreds of developers, while large companies can regain velocity, iterating and testing more quickly. While the product is currently in closed beta, early users are describing the software as “magic” and reporting that using Zenaton’s technology has reduced the time spent on workflow coding by as much as 80%.
Gilles Barbier said: “Too many of the world’s developers are spending too much time building workflows. We want companies to be able to spend more time analyzing and iterating, letting them improve their services and their interactions with customers. Today’s investment will let us hire more top-notch engineers to keep building this new tech, bringing our automation magic to more developers at more businesses.”
Accel Partner Philippe Botteri commented: “With over 20 million developers worldwide, the need for a simple solution to build workflows is growing exponentially. Zenaton’s platform brings task automation to critical business processes, and the phenomenal feedback from the initial users cemented our decision to invest early. We look forward to working with the highly talented team and helping them roll out such an essential and effective tool.”
