This article has been written Tom Henriksson, GP at OpenOcean and originally published here.

The terms “artificial intelligence” and “robotic process automation” have been subjected to a lot of hype. For a good half of the last decade, AI and RPA have been lauded in boardrooms, but often shunned by their employees, resulting in countless proof-of-concepts, and few truly intelligent automated processes and workflows. But are things about to change?

OpenOcean is a European VC focused on early-stage data-intensive B2B software startups. We believe that automation will become so seamlessly integrated and easy to use by organisations that it will…

No one could have imagined running a bank from their living room or kitchen, now it is simply a reality.”

In February, DataSeries — an OpenOcean led initiative hosted another virtual roundtable on how’ Business as usual is dead — long live operational resilience’. See below a summary of the insights that we have uncovered.

Operational resilience, the ability of organizations to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, was an overarching concern of financial services companies before the global health crisis. Now that concern is arguably an obsession and business as usual is no more.

There is no dearth of…

Operational resilience, the ability of organizations to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, was an overarching concern of financial services companies before the global health crisis. Now that concern is arguably an obsession and business as usual is no more.

There is no dearth of information about what organizations must do to be ready for unexpected events, partly because of other recent crises, such as the one in 2008 that crippled global financial markets.

Among the standard advice is to know what key services an organization needs and provides, and to be prepared to continue those under any circumstances. Firms…

We have mapped over 120 companies; new and old, large and small, according to their subsegment and the precise type of automation they provide. Find an intro & explanation to the map below.

The process automation space (RPA, Robotic Process Automation) continued to grow strongly in 2020, despite — or perhaps thanks to — the global shift to working from home. Software companies automating business processes raised over $1.9 billion in 2020; the broader automation software space raised over $11 billion, according to PitchBook data.

Fittingly for 2020, the most funding for a single company went to Olive, an AI-driven…

Thimble, a U.S. startup, offers flexible and short-term business
insurance to SMEs and micro-entrepreneurs. And business
couldn’t be better. “Demand has skyrocketed during the
pandemic,” says Thimble CEO Jay Bregman.

Employers in the U.S. have shed millions of permanent, full- time jobs and an increasing number of these laid-off workers are starting their own companies. They need insurance but due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic prefer not to take out the annual policies offered by traditional insurers. Thimble provides liability coverage for customers in more than 130 professions, including handymen, landscapers, cleaning people, and dog walkers. Policies can…

In late November the U.S. Federal Drug Administration approved Benevolent AI’s recommended arthritis drug Baricitnib as a COVID-19 treatment, just nine-months after the hypothesis was developed. The correlation between the properties of this existing Eli Lilly drug and a potential treatment for seriously ill COVID-19 patients, was made with the help of knowledge graphs, which represent data in context, in a manner that humans and machines can readily understand.

Knowledge graphs apply semantics to give context and relationships to data, providing a framework for data integration, unification, analytics and sharing. Think of them as a flexible means of discovering facts…

Everything was small data before we had big data.

Small data refers to data that humans can observe and process personally. Information about any individual in a crowd is small data. The same information, collected for all of the people in a crowd is big data.

Everything was small data before we had big data. The scientific discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries were all made using small data. Darwin used small data. Physicists made all calculations by hand, thus exclusively using small data. And yet, they discovered the most beautiful and most fundamental laws of nature. Moreover, they…

Companies that have been looking to implement automation tools prior to COVID-19 are still doing it partially due to the return of investment being quite quick in the space. For a category leader such as UiPath, 2020/Q1 has seen no change. Q2 is expected to be relatively flat due to the high level of uncertainty. Q3 & Q4 have an optimistic outlook (e.g. — BluePrism just raised $124m enhancing the RPA market’s continued strength in the face of an economic downturn).

Clients that have already implemented RPA/Automation solutions and are scaling this throughout their enterprise are doubling down on extending…