Investing in Tonkean.

Raviraj Jain
Lightspeed Venture Partners
3 min readApr 8, 2020
Tonkean’s founders Offir Talmor and Sagi Eliyahu

Every business has hundreds, sometimes thousands of processes. For example, processes to evaluate employee performance, to qualify sales leads, to escalate and resolve customer issues — the list goes on and on.

Over the years, organizations have identified and adopted various software applications to help them run these processes (such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Intercom, etc.) An average company uses 100+ different applications. Despite the rapid adoption of these software applications, most business processes are highly manual to date. This is because while a business process may involve a combination of applications, databases and communication channels, they are heavily reliant on people and specific to a given use case.

As a result, we’re seeing the emergence of operations teams to help manage, optimize and drive these processes across all functions, such as Marketing Ops, Legal Ops, Revenue Ops, IT Ops, HR Ops, etc. However, these teams are often inadequately staffed and have minimal engineering support. As processes evolve and as new applications are being adopted, the ops teams are playing catch up. This presents a distinct opportunity to build a platform to enable ops teams to establish, automate, monitor and improve these processes.

Enter Tonkean. Tonkean has built the essential no-code platform for all ops teams and Lightspeed is proud to lead the Company’s $24M Series A financing.

When we first spent time with Tonkean’s founders, Offir Talmor and Sagi Eliyahu, two things were very clear. First, we knew they were a team we absolutely wanted to partner with. As a team, they embody the type of entrepreneurs we look for: deep technical experience, strong product chops, drive to create a massive business and an inspiring journey through a startup pivot to iterating with customers to identify product/market fit.

Second, we realized they’ve built a product that is solving critical problems for its customers — and driving compelling results. As we spoke to customers, we learned that they would start using Tonkean for a couple of processes, but just within a few months, Tonkean would quickly establish itself as an essential tool for ops and functional leaders across the organization. Customers like TripActions and Hopper raved about the adaptability of the platform, the ease of use, the people collaboration aspects and the resultant ROI.

At the core of Tonkean’s Adaptive Business Operations (ABO) platform are adaptive modules. Adaptive modules contain the business logic of a particular process and connect to all the existing tools that may be part of a process such as forms, email, Slack or other system interfaces. Once configured Tonkean can automate all the routing work across systems and people, auto-handle all requests, push and pull any data into the company’s various enterprise systems and databases and track and report on the workflow. That’s not all, the platform also constantly adapts to the changing needs and preferences of the users.

Tonkean’s no-code platform requires zero technical skills. Anyone in the ops team can quickly create these adaptive modules to solve and optimize their unique challenges. Furthermore, these modules work with existing systems of communication and collaboration. As a result, users don’t have to change their behavior to get the benefits. This massively decreases change management efforts and reduces time to realize ROI.

Tonkean’s platform provides an immediate benefit for operations teams in all functions, from sales, marketing, customer support, legal, IT, HR, and more. By leveraging the platform, businesses can drive faster SLAs, higher customer satisfaction, and greater efficiency. Companies of all sizes, even those that don’t yet have an ops function, can leverage Tonkean to adapt more quickly to changing business demands by delivering solutions tailored to their unique set of processes, people, and systems in a faster, more cost-effective, and less change-intensive way.

It takes an ambitious and innovative team to recognize the opportunity to transform a market. At Lightspeed, we’re excited to partner with Offir and Sagi on their journey to build the essential adaptive platform for operations teams. Whether you’re a startup or a large enterprise, check out Tonkean and find out how they can transform your business operations.

— Raviraj Jain, Arif Janmohamed, Ravi Mhatre, and Anoushka Vaswani

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