Companies are experimenting with services like ChatGPT to help employees write memos, answer questions, and more. One of the clearest signs of how popular AI is is Really In the world of enterprise IT, AI is often included in the more routine applications that companies use. Today, a startup that embodies this axiom is announcing its funding, underscoring the pace of enterprise AI adoption.
Opkey has developed an AI platform that helps companies continuously test finance, HR and other enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Thanks to strong customer loyalty – more than 200 large enterprises as customers – and partnerships with system integrators such as KPMG and PwC, the startup has now closed a $47 million Series B.
PeakSpan Capital is leading the round, which also included participation from previous and current investors including UST Global, Verica, Vertical and India’s YouNest. This Series B is a big step forward for Dublin, California-based Opkey: The company had previously raised just $12 million. The startup is not disclosing its valuation.
Opkey’s platform may not be at the most visible end of the enterprise IT stack, but it fills a gap in the market that is critical to how enterprises do business.
Cloud architecture and SaaS have become the foundation on which new business services are built, but have also found their way into more traditional organizations undergoing digital transformation processes. They can be faster and cheaper to use and easier to deploy to a user base, but they also bring with them a host of problems – such as the fact that vulnerabilities or inconsistencies between software can bring down entire networks. This is where Opkey comes in.
Pankaj Goel, the CEO, founded the company along with his childhood friends Avinash Tiwari and Lalit Jain. All three are veterans of the ERP industry with experience at major companies like Adobe and Oracle. Their time there gave them experience in software testing, and they knew firsthand how disastrous it can be if not done right. ERP systems don’t typically exist in silos – they are integrated with each other to function. This means if one conflicts with another or doesn’t work properly, the entire ERP stack can crash.
“Cloud applications are constantly being updated, which was not the case with traditional software,” Goel said in an interview. “This functionality breaks existing functionality.” He estimates that a company typically integrates seven or eight ERP systems with each other. “Every time there is a change in the ecosystem, you have to test it again. This means companies are in testing hell.”
Testing and data hell are indeed classic problems that can be solved by AI-based automation, and cybersecurity and DevOps software companies have recognized this as well. In the case of Opkey and ERP, the platform continuously tracks integrations, updates, upgrades, and something the company describes as “user adoption” – how well end users interact with new features they are supposed to use. The packages and platforms Opkey currently covers include Oracle, Workday, Coupa, Veeva, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, UKG, and Trackwise.
Sanket Merchant, the partner at PeakSpan who led the investment, believes that as the IT sector evolves, there will continue to be very strong business interest in services like Opkey’s.
One question is whether this is enough to fend off competition from other vendors in the same space, such as Leapwork and Katalon. Another question is whether larger ERP vendors might try to take over this business themselves.
“The most expensive IT spend for companies is critical enterprise apps, their ERP apps,” he said, citing figures that show around $73 billion is spent each year on ERP software for billing, accounting, human resources, software deployment and more – in both smaller companies and large multinational organizations. These, in turn, can have up to 52 different other apps that rely on ERP integrations to function.
“Automated testing is critical to ensure the security of this investment and to ensure it works as intended. A failed SAP deployment or Workday migration can have a huge impact on a company’s revenue and brand.”
