Some analysts believe that the robotic process automation market, which uses AI to automate certain software tasks, is on the road to consolidation. A recent Forrester Research report predicts that the segment will flatten as early as 2023 as companies move to broader automation solutions. There is evidence to support this. UiPath, one of the largest RPA suppliers, saw its market cap drop from $35 billion to $15 million within a year. And a number of smaller players, including Signavio, Intellibot and Servicetrace, were acquired by established technology companies.
The headwinds may keep most RPA entrepreneurs from moving forward, but not Harpaul Sambhi. He is the co-founder of Magican RPA startup designed to move data across websites and web apps with a few keystrokes.
“Before Magical, I founded a company called Careerify, an HR tech startup acquired by LinkedIn in 2015. Like all founders, I wore a lot of hats, including sales, recruiting and customer support,” Sambhi told gotechbusiness.com in an email. -mail interview. “I found myself bombarded with repetitive tasks, such as copying and pasting information about candidates or prospects into spreadsheets and databases, and writing the same outreach message over and over. When I landed on LinkedIn, I noticed that my colleagues were also doing a lot of the same, be it recruiting, customer support, or business development. That is how the idea for Magical was born.”
Magical allows users to share templates and automation via ‘magic packs’.
In addition to co-founders Rosie Chopra, Zach Piepmeyer and Prashant Viswanathan, Sambhi launched Magical in 2020. The company initially delved into messaging, but eventually broadened its focus to transfer data across websites, databases, sheets and forms.
While Sambhi positions Magical as an RPA platform, it looks more like a text extension. If you type a custom abbreviation (e.g. “@name”, “@email”), Magical prompts for text snippets (e.g. “Alex”, “alex@example.com”) such as words, emojis, phrases, paragraphs, code blocks or templates. The software – which only supports Chrome for now – detects and “remembers” elements on web pages, enabling sharing of shortcuts (called “magic packs”). with other users and teams.
When asked about data retention, Sambhi said Magical stores metadata, but not the underlying data the platform moves. Keystrokes do not leave a user’s computer.
†Shortcut data is stored and encrypted on our servers. We store shortcuts and shortcuts on our servers in real time and make general backups daily (backups are kept for 14 days),” said Sambhi. “All communication with our servers is encrypted (via HTTPS). Our database of shortcuts is encrypted and text with shortcuts has an extra layer of encryption for even greater security and privacy.”
Text extensions are hardly new. But Magical’s cloud and browser-centric approach has caught the attention of investors such as Coatue Management, which kicked off its $35 million Series A funding round. The round, which closed today, brings Magical’s total to $41 million (after a previously undisclosed seed round of $6 million), also saw participation from Greylock, Bain, Lightspeed Capital, SV Angels and Blank Ventures.
Image Credits: Magic
Sambhi claims that more than 300,000 users and more than 10,000 businesses use Magical, including teams at Disney, Facebook, Salesforce and Uber. At this time Magical does not charge for its services. But the goal is to introduce paid plans with premium features in the future.
“We view our key competitors as heartbreaking tasks that every knowledge worker does every day, like typing the same message over and over or copying and pasting data between tabs. We see that so many knowledge workers still rely on these manual, outdated ways of working,” says Sambhi. “Leaders value Magical because we bring new operational efficiencies to the teams they lead. [They] also like us because they can ensure that information is consistent across the distribution of different software-as-a-service tools being used, and that teams are all working with the same information and on the same page.”
Magical plans to spend some of the Series A’s money on expanding the platform beyond Chrome and expanding its 18-strong workforce to 35 by the end of the year. Support for more desktop and mobile browsers is in the works.
†Our product will become smarter and more useful over time as we better understand how people do their jobs and how they think about repetition, workflow and the order of tasks. The more we know about what these tasks look like, the smarter we’ll get,” says Sambhi. “Our next product milestone will enable teams to collaborate and share their automations so that entire departments can maximize their time savings.”
