Startups

China’s work automation startup Laiye raises $160M, acquires France’s Mindsay

Comment

Image Credits: Laiye's head of EMEA Alliance, CEO International, GM EMEA and Mindsay's CEO

An ambitious Chinese startup wants a slice of the flourishing global work automation market. Laiye, a Beijing-based company that provides a one-stop platform for automating office tasks of varying degrees of complexity, just picked up $160 million from a Series C funding round to expand globally.

Guanchun Wang, Laiye’s founder and CEO, saw the “value of artificial intelligence” in the years he worked at Baidu’s smart speaker department after his film discovery startup was sold to the Chinese search engine giant. At the time, he also realized traditional industries were well underserved compared to the attention that internet platforms like short videos and news apps received from AI entrepreneurs. To fill the gap, he started Laiye in 2015.

Laiye’s Series C financing came in three tranches, with the last one to have recently closed at $70 million, an oversubscribed round led by influential Chinese private equity firm Hopu Magnolia. Other investors include VMS Group from Hong Kong, Chinese private equity firm Youshan Capital, as well as existing investors Lightspeed China and U.S.-based Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Adding Hong Kong-based investment firm VMS Group to the company’s cap table will bring the resources needed for a potential initial public offering in the city, said Wang. The company doesn’t have a timeline for its IPO yet but will hold early discussions with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the coming months.

Start from Paris

Concurrent with the fundraising announcement is Laiye’s acquisition of Paris-based chatbot service provider Mindsay for an undisclosed amount and transaction type. The two met through the startup’s investor Cathay Innovation, and the acqui-hire will pave the way for Laiye’s entry into the Europe market, said Wang.

In Paris, Laiye is slated to assemble a product and engineering force, building on top of Mindsay’s 30-people team. Much of the top developer talent in China has gotten just as expensive as their counterparts in Western countries, observed Wang, who holds a PhD in machine learning from Princeton. Laiye picked Paris as its springboard for entering the rest of Europe partly because Mindsay is there, but France itself is also a great source of science and engineering talent, the founder said.

Mindsay nicely complements Laiye’s main product offerings, which include conversational AI and robotic process automation (RPA), a technology that mimics repetitive human actions interacting with digital interfaces, such as processing an insurance claim, and one that has been popularized by New York-based UiPath.

While RPA software has universal adaptability, the success of scaling conversational AI is “highly dependent on language processing and data collection, which is why expanding RPA across different regions can’t happen overnight,” explained Wang. Acquiring Mindsay naturally allows Laiye to leapfrog the development challenges of training algorithms for a new language. Wang also saw a strong “cultural alignment” between his business and the French startup led by a team of young founders.

Laiye CEO Guanchun Wang. Image Credits: Laiye

Laiye has aggressive goals for global expansion. Right now, the company generates just about 20% of its revenues outside China, with customers spanning Europe, the Americas and Southeast Asia. It aims to raise that ratio to 50% by 2025, at which point it expects to be operating several tech development centers across various continents. Twenty percent of its employees are outside China at the moment, but it expects the proportion to reach 50% in a few years’ time.

The startup appears ready to have a crack at the international business front after bringing on a group of international C-suite executives. Ronen Lamdan, its CEO for international markets, for example, was a former sales director at Microsoft and led business process automation company WorkFusion in Asia.

Monetize

In terms of operational metrics, Wang said Laiye’s products for individual as well as SME users have already turned profitable, while its segment targeting Fortune 500 clients still requires significant investments in product development and sales.

“[Large corporations] are the biggest opportunity for us,” said Wang, who believed the competitive edge of his startup is its ability to provide an “integrated” platform that covers the full scope of an employee’s daily routines, from answering calls to processing documents, rather than solving just one single process.

Wang declined to disclose the valuation of his company, saying an announcement will be made when it reaches “unicorn status.” Worldwide Laiye has nearly 200 large corporate customers and global consultancies as strategic partners including Deloitte and KPMG. Its software suite is available on Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud across the globe, and it boasts a community of 600,000 developers working on all forms of work automation solutions.

Laiye, China’s answer to UiPath, closes $50 million Series C+

More TechCrunch

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. OpenAI announced this week that…

Scarlett Johansson brought receipts to the OpenAI controversy

Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries like agriculture, and they’re also important to help prevent and mitigate harm from inclement weather events or natural disasters. But getting forecasts right…

Deal Dive: Can blockchain make weather forecasts better? WeatherXM thinks so

pcTattletale’s website was briefly defaced and contained links containing files from the spyware maker’s servers, before going offline.

Spyware app pcTattletale was hacked and its website defaced

Featured Article

Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Synapse’s bankruptcy shows just how treacherous things are for the often-interdependent fintech world when one key player hits trouble. 

6 hours ago
Synapse, backed by a16z, has collapsed, and 10 million consumers could be hurt

Sarah Myers West, profiled as part of TechCrunch’s Women in AI series, is managing director at the AI Now institute.

Women in AI: Sarah Myers West says we should ask, ‘Why build AI at all?’

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI and publishers are partners of convenience

Evan, a high school sophomore from Houston, was stuck on a calculus problem. He pulled up Answer AI on his iPhone, snapped a photo of the problem from his Advanced…

AI tutors are quietly changing how kids in the US study, and the leading apps are from China

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Well,…

Startups Weekly: Drama at Techstars. Drama in AI. Drama everywhere.

Last year’s investor dreams of a strong 2024 IPO pipeline have faded, if not fully disappeared, as we approach the halfway point of the year. 2024 delivered four venture-backed tech…

From Plaid to Figma, here are the startups that are likely — or definitely — not having IPOs this year

Federal safety regulators have discovered nine more incidents that raise questions about the safety of Waymo’s self-driving vehicles operating in Phoenix and San Francisco.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration…

Feds add nine more incidents to Waymo robotaxi investigation

Terra One’s pitch deck has a few wins, but also a few misses. Here’s how to fix that.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Terra One’s $7.5M Seed deck

Chinasa T. Okolo researches AI policy and governance in the Global South.

Women in AI: Chinasa T. Okolo researches AI’s impact on the Global South

TechCrunch Disrupt takes place on October 28–30 in San Francisco. While the event is a few months away, the deadline to secure your early-bird tickets and save up to $800…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird tickets fly away next Friday

Another week, and another round of crazy cash injections and valuations emerged from the AI realm. DeepL, an AI language translation startup, raised $300 million on a $2 billion valuation;…

Big tech companies are plowing money into AI startups, which could help them dodge antitrust concerns

If raised, this new fund, the firm’s third, would be its largest to date.

Harlem Capital is raising a $150 million fund

About half a million patients have been notified so far, but the number of affected individuals is likely far higher.

US pharma giant Cencora says Americans’ health information stolen in data breach

Attention, tech enthusiasts and startup supporters! The final countdown is here: Today is the last day to cast your vote for the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice program. Voting closes…

Last day to vote for TC Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice program

Featured Article

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker on the Telegram security clash and the ‘edge lords’ at OpenAI 

Among other things, Whittaker is concerned about the concentration of power in the five main social media platforms.

1 day ago
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker on the Telegram security clash and the ‘edge lords’ at OpenAI 

Lucid Motors is laying off about 400 employees, or roughly 6% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring ahead of the launch of its first electric SUV later this…

Lucid Motors slashes 400 jobs ahead of crucial SUV launch

Google is investing nearly $350 million in Flipkart, becoming the latest high-profile name to back the Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup. The Android-maker will also provide Flipkart with cloud offerings as…

Google invests $350 million in Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart

A Jio Financial unit plans to purchase customer premises equipment and telecom gear worth $4.32 billion from Reliance Retail.

Jio Financial unit to buy $4.32B of telecom gear from Reliance Retail

Foursquare, the location-focused outfit that in 2020 merged with Factual, another location-focused outfit, is joining the parade of companies to make cuts to one of its biggest cost centers –…

Foursquare just laid off 105 employees

“Running with scissors is a cardio exercise that can increase your heart rate and require concentration and focus,” says Google’s new AI search feature. “Some say it can also improve…

Using memes, social media users have become red teams for half-baked AI features

The European Space Agency selected two companies on Wednesday to advance designs of a cargo spacecraft that could establish the continent’s first sovereign access to space.  The two awardees, major…

ESA prepares for the post-ISS era, selects The Exploration Company, Thales Alenia to develop cargo spacecraft

Expressable is a platform that offers one-on-one virtual sessions with speech language pathologists.

Expressable brings speech therapy into the home

The French Secretary of State for the Digital Economy as of this year, Marina Ferrari, revealed this year’s laureates during VivaTech week in Paris. According to its promoters, this fifth…

The biggest French startups in 2024 according to the French government

Spotify is notifying customers who purchased its Car Thing product that the devices will stop working after December 9, 2024. The company discontinued the device back in July 2022, but…

Spotify to shut off Car Thing for good, leading users to demand refunds

Elon Musk’s X is preparing to make “likes” private on the social network, in a change that could potentially confuse users over the difference between something they’ve favorited and something…

X should bring back stars, not hide ‘likes’

The FCC has proposed a $6 million fine for the scammer who used voice-cloning tech to impersonate President Biden in a series of illegal robocalls during a New Hampshire primary…

$6M fine for robocaller who used AI to clone Biden’s voice

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Is it…

Tesla lobbies for Elon and Kia taps into the GenAI hype