The funding comes less than a year after Bryter raised a seed round \u2014 $6 million in November 2019 \u2014 and it was oversubscribed, with term sheets coming in from many of the bigger VCs in Europe and the U.S. With this funding, the company has now raised around $25 million, and while the valuation is considerably up on the last round, Bryter is not disclosing what it is.<\/p>\n
Michael Grupp, the CEO who co-founded the company with Micha-Manuel Bues and Michael H\u00fcbl (pictured below), said that the whole Series A process took no more than a month to initiate and close, an impressive turnaround considering the chilling effect that the COVID-19 health pandemic has had on dealmaking.<\/p>\n
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Part of the reason for the enthusiasm is because of the traction that Bryter has had since launching in 2018. Its 50 enterprise customers include the likes of McDonald\u2019s, Telef\u00f3nica, banks, healthcare and industrial companies, and professional services firms PwC, KPMG and Deloitte (who in turn use it for themselves as well as for clients). (Note: Because of its target users being large enterprises, the company doesn\u2019t publish per-person pricing on its site as such.)<\/p>\n
Bryter\u2019s been seeing a lot of attention from customers and investors because its platform speaks to a big opportunity within the wider world of software today.<\/p>\n
Enterprise IT has long been thought of as the less-fun end of technology: It\u2019s all about getting work done, and a lot of the software used in a business environment is complex and often requires technical knowledge to implement, use, fix and adapt in any way.<\/p>\n
This may still the case for a lot of it, especially for the most sophisticated tools, but at the same time we have seen a lot of \u201cconsumerization\u201d come into IT, where user-friendly hardware and software built for consumers \u2014 specifically non-technical consumers \u2014 either inspires new enterprise services, or are simply directly imported into the workplace environment.<\/p>\n
No-code software \u2014 like automation, another big trend in enterprise IT right now \u2014 plays a big role in how enterprise tools are becoming more user-friendly. One of the biggest roadblocks in a lot of office environments is that when workers identify things that don\u2019t work, or could work much better than they do, they need to file tickets and get IT teams \u2014 also often overworked \u2014 to do the fixing for them. No-code platforms can help circumvent some of that work \u2014 so long as the roadblock of IT approves the use, that is.<\/p>\n
Bryter\u2019s conception and existence comes out of the no-code trend. It plays on the same ideas as IFTTT or Zapier but is very firmly aimed at users who might use pieces of enterprise software as part of their jobs, but have never had to delve into figuring out how they actually work.<\/p>\n
There are already a lot of \u201clow-code\u201d (minimal coding) and other no-code platforms on the market today for business (not consumer) use cases. They include Blender.io, Zapier, Tray.io (a London-founded startup that itself raised a big round<\/a> last autumn), n8n (also German, backed by Sequoia<\/a>), and also biggies like MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce<\/a> in 2018 at a $6.5 billion valuation).<\/p>\n Bryter\u2019s contention is that many of these actually need more technical know-how than they initially claim. Grupp pointed out that the earliest automation tools for enterprise have been around for decades at this point, but even most of the very modern descendants of those \u201cwill require some coding.\u201d Bryter\u2019s toolbox essentially lets users create dialogues with users \u2014 which they can program based on the expertise that they will have in their particular fields \u2014 which then sources data they can then plug into other software via the Bryter platform in order to \u201cperform\u201d different tasks more quickly.<\/p>\n Grupp\u2019s contention is that while these kinds of tools have long been used, they will be in even more demand going forward.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter COVID-19, workers will be even more distributed,\u201d he said. \u201cTeams and individuals will need to access information in a faster way, and the only way for big organizations to distribute that knowledge is through more digital tools.\u201d The idea is that Bryter can essentially help bridge those gaps in a more efficient way.<\/p>\n