AutomatePro closes a £5m Series A to scale their DevOps platform

TL;DR

• AutomatePro completed their Series A with a £5m investment from YFM, advised by Mountside Ventures.
• Their DevOps software for enterprise platforms accelerates upgrades and testing with intelligent automation.
• They will use the capital to fund the growth of their sales team, US expansion, and customer success capabilities.

What do they do?

AutomatePro improves the efficiency and effectiveness of DevOps teams and helps maintain critical software infrastructure for the spectrum of enterprises, including retailers, banks, pharmaceutical companies, and IT services partners.

What we love about the company:

• Automation — we love automation! Large complex organisations continue to run thousands of time-consuming repetitive manual tasks unnecessarily. AutomatePro uses AI to automate regression testing, which improves job satisfaction of IT teams, keeps software up to date, and helps C-level executives deliver better ROI. They’re able to save large organisations over £100k through automating regression testing and reducing the resource requirements involved, by up to 86%.
• Experienced team — they’ve got an all-star team of practical leaders with deep domain experience delivering complicated IT solutions to global corporations.
• Compelling partnerships — they have built their product on top of the infrastructure of a leading software company, ServiceNow, helping them with testing their SaaS platform. The ServiceNow ecosystem is large enough in itself to build a huge business, but this is just the start.

Closing the round with YFM

Paul Chorley, Co-Founder, and CEO of AutomatePro said,

As technical founders, we needed trusted experts to help guide us through the institutional investment process, which was completely new to us. The Mountside teams’ experience and expertise in all aspects of the investment process, in everything from preparation through to negotiating heads of terms, was invaluable and always delivered in a friendly and professional way.

The team received plenty of interest from UK investors and chose YFM to lead their £5m round. YFM have previously invested in the DevOps space through investments in Quality Clouds and Plandek, and so are well placed to understand their thesis and bolster the team’s expertise.

Roshan Puri, Investment Director at YFM Equity Partners said

The AutomatePro team has built a world-class SaaS product that’s delivering significant value to some of the largest and most complex organisations. AI driven automated testing is key feature of DevOps best practice and has become a necessity for organisations looking to maximise value from their IT infrastructure and IT talent. We are really bullish on investing further in software and services business enabling DevOps, and the great teams we are backing are benefiting from being part of a group of high-growth business in this space with the common support of YFM.

What’s next?

The team is laser-focused on deploying their Series A to:

• Grow their sales team;
• Develop their marketing & customer success capability in order to capitalise on their expansive client use cases to date;
• Expand into the US (as many of their hero clients are transatlantic); and
• Continue their software innovation across the growing ServiceNow ecosystem and beyond.

The team will soon be hiring! Watch this space to keep updated on job openings.

If you’re a founder looking to raise your late seed to Series B, we’d love to hear from you — submit details of your company here, and we’ll aim to respond within 48 hours!