Gresham House Ventures announces an investment in Rainbird, an automation platform that scales, augments, and enhances best practice decision-making for businesses.
The Rainbird platform transforms organisational value and customer outcomes. Businesses can simply and cost-effectively replicate best practice decision-making and make it available at scale. Based on nuanced human reasoning, Rainbird handles complex decisions – unlike simplistic ‘if this then that’ decision trees. It makes accurate judgements, handles uncertainty, and provides an auditable rationale for every decision.
Rainbird leverages human expertise to go beyond standard Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA technologies automate tasks, but Rainbird automates decisions. The platform’s unique market position enables businesses in any sector to cost-effectively replicate complex decision-making and make it available at scale.
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are essential in driving the Rainbird platform. SMEs model their business expertise in the Rainbird Editor, a user-friendly interface that allows users to draw out their logic in knowledge maps, either visually or using the platform’s in-line modelling language, RBLang. The Rainbird Runtime is the powerful goal-based inference engine that is responsible for all reasoning, basing its automated decision-making on the knowledge maps created in the Editor. It combines with real-time data sources to solve queries via web assistants, chatbots, apps or other worker applications.
Decisions are entirely auditable via an in-built evidence tree – a crucial function for businesses striving for explainable, transparent and compliant automation solutions.
Rainbird has quickly and efficiently developed from a proof-of-concept to a sizeable business with enterprise contracts. It works closely with leading global organisations across finance, legal, professional services, insurance and healthcare sectors. For example, international law firm Taylor Wessing LLP uses Rainbird to automate regulatory advice, freeing up time for lawyers to focus on other opportunities.
Founded in 2013, Rainbird has locations across the UK in Norwich and London. The company is also expanding to the US and is in the process of building a global partner network. The Executive and Leadership Team includes: Executive Chairman, James Duez; Chief Executive Officer, Ben Taylor; Chief Operations Officer, James Loft; Head of Sales, Freddie Coventry; Head of Communications, Nisha Deo; Head of Implementation and Head of Platform Innovation, Michael Price.
The investment builds on the RPA credentials of the Gresham House Ventures team, having previously invested in RPA consultancy Symphony Ventures, which was sold to US-listed Sykes Enterprises, Inc. for £52m in November 2018. Gresham House’s investment will enable the continued commercialisation of the product, giving Rainbird a cash runway to secure substantial further anticipated revenues.
Gresham House Ventures invests equity of up to £5m in growth businesses, supporting founders with bold ambitions for the future, whilst providing transformational capital and expertise to accelerate business potential.
Commenting on the investment, James Duez at Rainbird said:
“Rainbird is thrilled to introduce Gresham House to how our automation platform paves the way for any organisation to case-effectively synthesize best-practice decision-making and make it available at scale. We believe people are an organisation’s most valuable resource and businesses that combine human expertise with Rainbird will gain a definitive competitive advantage.”
The Rainbird team have done a fantastic job of building a game-changing business within the automation space. The quality of their clients and pedigree of the management team speak to the potential we see in this business to become a true disruptor, not just within the RPA space, but within all of the industries ripe for the efficiencies generated by intelligent automation.
– Brendan Gulston, Investment Director, Gresham House Equity Funds
