Behind the Term Sheet: How Skan’s AI-Powered “Dynamic Process Intelligence” is Disrupting a $100B Industry
By: Simon Wu & Jason Chen
Over a year ago, we shared our investment in process intelligence platform Skan, leading its $14M Series A. Since then, the process discovery market has continued to heat up from M&A to increased awareness among research analysts — with Skan recently named a leader in NelsonHall’s 2021 Report for Process Discovery and Mining.
Today, we’re excited to announce Skan’s $40M Series B, led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Liberty Global, GSR Ventures and existing investors including us at Cathay Innovation. Following a year of tremendous growth, we’re even more bullish about Skan’s future. Here’s Why.
“Skan is disrupting a $100B industry that has largely relied on manual human observation with computer vision and AI capabilities delivering unprecedented levels of real-time insight for operational leaders.”
— Avinash Misra, Co-Founder & CEO, Skan
As Remote Work Collides with Enterprise Operations — Process Intelligence is a Top Priority in Digital Transformation Journey
According to Skan, 75% of large enterprises are moving to a permanent, more geographically distributed workforce. This has not only led to billions being invested in digital transformation, but it’s specifically propelled process intelligence to a top 3 priority for operational leaders.
Both large enterprises and vendors now recognize that workflow automation solutions only solve the initial set of issues around digital transformation. This explains why we’ve seen several automation vendors making strategic acquisitions over the last year: SAP acquiring Signavio or Appian acquiring Lana Labs.
However, traditional process mining solutions largely rely on log-based methods — resulting in an incomplete view of existing processes as not every application or step produces event data. On the other hand, many modern solutions lack the necessary security measures that are suitable for larger corporations — particularly those in highly regulated industries. What enterprises need is a more complete, accurate and secure approach that offers a deeper analysis and real-time recommendations for process improvements. Only then, will they be successful in their transformation journey.
Enter Skan — A Privacy-First, Foundational Platform for the Transformation of Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare to Telecom & Beyond
Founded in 2018, Skan has re-envisioned legacy process mining by pioneering what they call “dynamic process intelligence” — granting operational leaders end-to-end visibility into processes and empowering data-driven decisions.
By leveraging computer vision and AI, with a zero-integration approach, Skan’s solution allows enterprises to automatically develop detailed, automation-ready process maps and provide continuous, actionable insights in weeks vs. months. It helps operational leaders in charge of underwriting, customer onboarding, claims, contact centers, and collections better understand automation and optimization opportunities, how to upskill the workforce along with compliance gaps.
And with its privacy-first architecture, Skan can securely scale in various regulated industries and works with over 20 of the world’s top financial services, healthcare and insurance companies such as AXA and LoanDepot. Just within the last year, the company has brought on some of the largest financial institutions and companies (e.g., Unum Insurance, Optum, LPL Financial, and Lexis Nexis) to accelerate their digital transformation efforts — leading to 9x growth in ARR.
Looking forward, the new financing will enable Skan to expand to additional sectors. Working with new investors Dell Ventures, Liberty Global and GSR Ventures, along with Cathay’s extensive ecosystem of corporate partners, the company can make further headway in industries starting with healthcare and telecom. But as digital transformation continues to sweep across the entire economy — this just marks the beginning.
Parting Thoughts — “No Shortcuts in Digital Transformation; No Transformation without Operational Insights”
Since our initial investment, Skan has been busy building a world class team for the world class digital transformation problem. Joining founders Avinash Misra (CEO) and Manish Garg (CPO), the company welcomed Aman Ramgrass as VP of Partnerships & Operations, Christian Berg as VP of Product Management, Scott Teeple as Head of Solutions Engineering, Kimberly Warren as Director of Customer Success, Laura Burgess as Head of People, and Justin Gavin as Director of FP&A.
What we’ve learned from Skan is that there are truly no shortcuts to digital transformation. Without a model of work that unifies transactions, processes, applications, and humans — there’s no way to understand operations. And without a deep operational understanding, transformation has no basis. Skan has built the foundational platform of work intelligence — bringing the much needed transparency and security to design the future of work across industries. While Skan is still in its early days, we’ve been massively impressed by how quickly they’ve progressed and remain optimistic for what’s in store for 2022!
