US giant Salesforce partners with software startup Apromore after $15.3m capital raise

Melbourne-based software startup Apromore has teamed up with Salesforce, the world’s largest customer relations management system provider, after the US giant participated in a US$10.3 million ($15.37 million) capital raising by the company.

Apromore, a process mining technology company that counts two of Australia’s top-four banks among its clients, secured the Series B funding from Saleforce and Germany’s GBTEC, a fellow process mining outfit that is backed by Main Capital Partners.

Process mining is being increasingly used by large corporations in a bid to avert potential problems when implementing digital transformation strategies. It enables rapid, objective process discovery at scale, allowing users to analyse business processes and pinpoint areas of friction, inefficiency and non-compliance.

The latest funding round, part of a total US$23.3 million ($34.7 million) raised by Apromore since inception in 2019, will be used to expand its product capabilities and connectivity options to meet a growing client base in the financial services, telecommunications and service industry sectors.

Apromore, which currently has more than 40 staff, plans to use the funding to expand into Europe and the UK, while delving into the field of prescriptive process analytics and AI-augmented process optimisation.

The investment by Salesforce has also formalised a partnership with Apromore to provide transparent connectivity between Salesforce Clouds and the Apromore process mining platform, leveraging the US giant’s MuleSoft technology.

The investment by Salesforce stems from the preliminary partnership struck in June this year with the MuleSoft Technology Partners program which offers ready-to-use connectors for customers to seamlessly automate key business processes.

The partnership led to the release of a MuleSoft certified connector accessible on the Anypoint Exchange marketplace where Apromore’s connector is currently available.

MuleSoft says the partnership demonstrated Apromore’s technical capabilities. It says using the Apromore connector via Anypoint Exchange allows businesses to uncover the actual paths and performance of their lead-to-quote or incident management processes running in Salesforce Sales Cloud or Service Cloud respectively.

“For businesses to keep up with increasing customer and employee demands, accelerated digital transformation is critical,” says Liam Doyle, general manager of automation at MuleSoft.

“Salesforce Flow is an end-to-end automation platform, powered by MuleSoft, that can bring automation to any system or data source, anywhere.

“This partnership allows our mutual customers to map and analyse business processes orchestrated by Salesforce and uncover opportunities to drive business agility and efficient growth through automation.”

Apromore, which was commercialised from research at the University of Melbourne, is one of the few investments made by Salesforce this year.

Apromore says the partnership represents a strategic opportunity to help Salesforce customers find improved efficiencies, intelligent automation and better customer experience from data within their Salesforce systems.

“As businesses look for solutions to improve profitability, customer experience and efficient delivery to combat rising costs, process mining is providing a competitive advantage of increased agility against ongoing economic disruption,” says Marcello La Rosa, the Apromore CEO and a University of Melbourne professor.

“Combined with the investment, the partnership with Salesforce validates the need for process mining solutions that are system-neutral and can be quickly deployed to empower citizen process experts.”  

Since 2019, Apromore has established key global partnerships with the likes of Deloitte, FPT Software in Asia and the US, and Heartcore in Japan.

The company also has academic alliances of more than 150 educators in more than 100 universities globally providing process mining education to more than 5000 students per year.

The process mining market is estimated to be worth $540 million globally but is expected to surge to $2.3 billion by 2025 and $7.8 billion by 2028.