FortressIQ, creator of a cognitive automation platform that powers and accelerates digital transformation through imitation learning, announced it has raised $12 million in Series A financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners. This new capital extends $4 million in seed funding from Boldstart Ventures, Comcast Ventures and Eniac Ventures, bringing the total funds raised to date to $16 million.

Founded in 2017, FortressIQ pioneered a fundamentally new way for Global 2000 companies to achieve their transformation goals. Recognizing that the largest obstacle to digital transformation is the lack of detailed information on current state of operations, FortressIQ spent 18 months working with corporate transformation teams building AI to solve their most pressing needs. This powerful platform addresses Peter Drucker’s age-old maxim that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” by delivering the quantified workforce and providing the data today’s enterprise needs to optimize their transformation initiatives.

“FortressIQ’s technology provides the insights necessary for a global organization to integrate the digital workforce into their operations,” said Nakul Mandan, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “We think the company’s strong management team, with its data-driven approach, is uniquely positioned to alter the expensive, slow and inefficient methodologies that prevent businesses from fully realizing their digital transformation initiatives today.”

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Each year, billions of dollars and millions of hours are spent with process analysts interviewing users and generating documentation. The large diversity, age and customization of enterprise applications has made traditional technical solutions to this problem impossible, forcing organizations that want a detailed understanding of their complex operations down a laborious and often error-prone path that can take months for a single business function. As PwC puts it, we should “imagine a world in which automation tools watch how we work, then use artificial intelligence (AI)-driven insights to tell us how to work better (or upgrade our work efforts for us) on the fly.” FortressIQ delivers that vision.

How the FortressIQ Cognitive Automation Platform Works

At the heart of the platform is the FortressIQ Virtual Process Analyst, which structurally changes how companies acquire knowledge of their operations, learning the same way that humans do, through observation. The Virtual Process Analyst transparently learns a business process and all its permutations as they occur in real-time, then assesses, analyzes and provides valuable insights to guide operational change in days.

Leveraging computer vision instead of user interviews, APIs or transaction logs, the Virtual Process Analyst requires zero integration and can work with any application, on premise or cloud based, instantly. FortressIQ provides a time to value in weeks, and meets all the needs of compliance, IT/Infosec and operations.

“We’re thrilled to partner with a premier enterprise investor like Lightspeed, which has deep knowledge of the Global 2000 and their digital needs,” said Pankaj Chowdhry, founder and CEO of FortressIQ. “After speaking with hundreds of companies it became clear that the dollars being wasted on process assessments and documentation are a ‘tax on innovation,’ syphoning dollars from transformation initiatives. To address this grim reality, we’re delivering on the promise of cognitive automation with the GA release of our platform, putting us in a strong position to build on the sales momentum and traction we’re already experiencing with Fortune 500 companies.”

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