The founders of DigitalBrain have a nice backstory, a couple of immigrants living in a hacker house in San Francisco, the two paid bills for a while by participating in hackathons and winning. When they came up with an idea for a company called DigitalBrain, they joined Y Combinator in the summer of 2020 and have been building a business ever since.
Today, the company’s founders were rewarded for their hard work with a $16 million Series A. While they were at it, they also announced that they would be changing their name to Luminai.
Company co-founder Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran says the startup has come a long way since Vidak For Congress concluded its starting round in 2020. He said that the original product had about 10 features, but the one that really stuck was the RPA-like functionality that completed a series of steps for a user in a single click.
“When we first built the product, we had built about ten functions. And then as we repeated it with our first group of design partners and customers, we found that today one specific product became the full-fledged product, taking any kind of multi-click, multi-step process and turning it into one click,” he told me.
What Luminai does now is record a video of a user jumping between different systems. “With the Luminai recorder, we track the clicks and keystrokes and our software can recognize whether an API is available or not, and then replicate the exact same workflow in the background.”
Dinakaran says his clients describe it as a macro on steroids, but he says what really sets it apart from pure RPA tools is the ability to connect to API gateways when available. “What’s different is that we’re kind of combining RPA with traditional API-based integration,” he said.
If there is no API or if the company does not want to allow Luminai access to the gateway for some reason, for example if it is a financial gateway, the tool can use standard RPA style recording techniques to go through a workflow.
The company is still running with just 11 employees and although they hedge their bets with the A round, he says they have revenue and most of the company’s $3.4 million starting round is still in the bank. . He said the seed round meant he and his co-founder no longer had to worry about basic necessities like food and rent and could focus entirely on the business.
One thing he is particularly proud of is that his cousins in India now see startup founder as something within reach. “The other part of the story is some of my cousins want to be founders and now they see some kind of a path and that gives me a lot of joy in many ways,” he said.
General Catalyst led today’s round with the participation of Moxxie Ventures, Underscore VC, Craft Ventures, YC Continuity and a slew of prominent industry angels. The company has now raised nearly $20 million.