Scribe Raises $75M at $1.3B Valuation to Show Enterprises Where AI Automation Actually Pays Off

Scribe hits $1.3B valuation as it moves to show where AI will actually pay off | TechCrunch

After helping several enterprises document how work actually happens, Scribe has raised $75 million at a $1.3 billion post-money valuation to roll out Scribe Optimize, a platform that maps workflows across the enterprise to reveal where automation and AI will actually yield returns -- instead of becoming another sunk cost. The all-equity Series C round was led by StepStone, with participation from existing investors Amplify Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Tiger Global, Morado Ventures, and New York Life Ventures. The new funding comes over a year after Scribe raised its $25 million Series B, capital the five-year-old startup has largely not needed to draw down, co-founder and CEO Jennifer Smith (pictured above, left) said in an exclusive interview. With this round, Scribe plans to accelerate the rollout of Scribe Optimize and related products, as enterprises struggle to determine where AI and automation will have the greatest impact. Many companies are racing to adopt AI, but Smith told TechCrunch that most still cannot answer a fundamental question: What should we automate first? Enterprises often try to find the answer through interviews, workshops, or by bringing in consultants, she said, approaches that take months and still miss much of what people actually do on a day-to-day basis. "Without really knowing how work is done, it is really hard to know where to improve it, where to automate it, where agents can help," she said. "Scribe Optimize is all about answering that question. Very simply, it mines across workflows for what people are doing when they're at work, and then it abstracts those up into being able to show you in a single pane of glass, here are the actual workflows that are being done. Here's how often, how long it takes, etc." Founded in 2019 by Smith and Aaron Podoln (CTO) (pictured above, right), Scribe started before the GenAI boom, and its current flagship product, Scribe Capture, helps automatically document how work is done. When someone completes a process or workflow, Capture generates a step-by-step guide using its browser extension and desktop app, along with text and screenshots. Those guides can be shared with colleagues or embedded in internal tools to reduce repeated questions, minimize errors, and expedite onboarding. Customers using Scribe Capture report saving 35 to 42 hours per person per month and making new hires 40% faster, the startup said. The market of process documentation includes players including Tango, Iorad, UserGuiding, and Spekit. Nonetheless, Smith told TechCrunch that Scribe competes against the status quo of people manually recording workflows. "People are still using stopwatches to sit behind somebody and understand what this process is," she said. "Even now, when it comes to deploying AI agents, the irony is that the process of deploying agents is incredibly manual." To date, Scribe has documented more than 10 million workflows across 40,000 software applications. The startup said that it has more than 5 million users and is used by teams inside 94% of Fortune 500 companies. Further, 78,000 organizations are its paid customers. It counts teams at New York Life, T-Mobile, LinkedIn, Hubspot, and Northern Trust among its users. "Users come to Scribe not because their boss tells them to, but because they want to," Smith told TechCrunch. "It starts with the end user, and then goes up to their team lead, department lead, and then some kind of central function who are all interested in it for the question of, how do we scale, what we know, how to do, and how do we get better?" The San Francisco-based startup sees the U.K., Canada, Australia, and Europe among its biggest markets after the U.S. Scribe said it has more than doubled its revenue over the past year, though it did not disclose figures, and also said its valuation has increased fivefold since its last round. The startup currently has a headcount of 120 employees, and it plans to double that number in the next 12 months, Smith said.

AI platform Scribe is a $1.3 billion startup that wants to tell you how to work smarter | Fortune

In 2019, Jennifer Smith and Aaron Podolny cofounder Scribe to help companies document how work gets done and automatically generate step-by-step guides for employees. As a former McKinsey management consultant, Jennifer Smith recalls the pain of trying to capture and document employee workflows. "I would literally look over people's shoulders with stop watches and write down what I saw them do," she said. But that granular understanding of how employees spend their time and get their work done is needed for onboarding and offboarding workers, or explaining complex internal processes. "Most of that work's invisible," she explained. "It lives in people's heads and is institutional know-how that walks out the door every day at 5 p.m. and you have to hope that it comes back." So in 2019, Smith cofounded Scribe, a workflow AI platform to help companies document how work gets done and automatically generate step-by-step guides for employees. This week, the company announced a new $75 million Series C funding round, bringing total funding to $130 million at a $1.3 billion valuation, Smith said. Investors include StepStone, Amplify Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Tiger Global, among others. Smith, Scribe's CEO, said the new funding round will go toward launching Scribe Optimize, an agent that analyzes workflows and offers tailored suggestions on how to improve them. Currently, Scribe boasts 75,000 customers, including LinkedIn, T-Mobile, and New York Life. Smith says 45% of Fortune 500 companies are paying customers, though a free version is also available. And in a space currently led by consultancies, Smith says she's banking on time savings to set her product apart. The technology doesn't come cheap, with a price tag in the "five to seven figures" per year, depending on usage, product configuration, and level of customization, with team plans starting at $12 per user per month, the company said. But Smith cites customer surveys indicating that employees can save between 35 and 41 hours per month using the system. "I think the way that we spend most of our nine-to-five knowledge work is a deep waste of time," Smith said. "Human talent is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, and we're just grossly misallocating it in the way that we structure work." Where did performance reviews come from? They've been around for more than a century, but many companies are starting to reconsider how they do them. Wall Street Journal Once associated with politics, the chief of staff position is becoming more popular in the business world. Financial Times

Scribe raises $75M for its process documentation platform - SiliconANGLE

Scribe, a startup that helps workers use business applications more efficiently, has closed a $75 million funding round led by . StepStone. TechCrunch reported today that the Series C investment also included the participation of Redpoint Ventures, Tiger Global and other returning backers. It values Scribe at $1.3 billion. That's reportedly five times what the company was worth following its last funding round in early 2024. Teaching employees how to use work applications can be a highly time-consuming task for information technology teams. Administrators have to provide guidance not only the first time a new hire launches an application, but also whenever there are significant feature changes. The more employees use an application, the more time the task requires. Scribe, officially Colony Labs Inc., offers an artificial intelligence platform that automates the process. It enables workers to record how they go about performing a task in an application using a desktop client or a browser extension. Scribe automatically turns the collected data into a guide that other employees can use to learn how to perform the task. Scribe-generated guides include screenshots of the relevant interface sections. According to the company, its platform automatically removes any sensitive business data that may be shown in the screenshots before broadly sharing them with employees. If the workers who prepare a task guide recorded unnecessary or erroneous steps, they can remove them before publishing the walkthrough. Scribe makes it possible to share a newly created guide as a PDF, a knowledge base article or via a third-party service. Additionally, companies can turn guidelines into a walkthrough overlaid on the interface of the application being explained. Whenever a learner completes one of the steps involved in a task, the walkthrough displays a visual cue that highlights the next action. Onboarding new employees is not the only task that Scribe promises to speed up. When there are multiple ways to complete a task in an application, companies can create a guide that outlines the fastest, most reliable method. Scribe says that creating such standardized procedures can save 35 hours per worker per month while reducing errors. Besides speeding up backoffice work, the platform also lends itself to customer service automation. Software companies can use Scribe to create self-service interface walkthroughs for their users. Such walkthroughs can reduce the number of support requests that users send to the customer support team. Scribe disclosed on occasion of the new funding round that its platform is used by workers at 94% of the Fortune 500. Its installed base also includes more than 77,000 other organizations. Those customers have used its platform to generate documentation for more than 10 million tasks.

Scribe Secures $75 Million in Funding by Showing Where AI, Automation Make Money | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. According to a TechCrunch report, the new funding may enable Scribe to speed up the launch of Scribe Optimize. The platform is designed to automatically map workflows across entire organizations and help them identify processes best suited for automation or AI interventions. In an interview with TechCrunch, Scribe CEO Jennifer Smith said that in many organizations measuring the efficiency of day-to-day workflows is being measured by manual processes. "Very simply, [Scribe Optimize] mines across workflows for what people are doing when they're at work, and then it abstracts those up into being able to show you in a single pane of glass, here are the actual workflows that are being done. Here's how often, how long it takes, etc.," she said. Scribe Optimize collects and aggregates data on task frequency, duration, and variations in workflows to provide actionable insights to business leaders. From there, strategic decisions can be made to reduce costly and ineffective automation efforts by focusing on areas with clear potential for efficiency gains. Scribe's original product, Scribe Capture, creates step-by-step guides of workflows by capturing user actions within software applications. According to the report, the platform is used by more than 5 million users and Scribe has documented over 10 million workflows across 40,000 software programs. That detailed, AI-powered workflow data could potentially be applied to cost savings and financial outcomes analysis. Speaking of operational visibility, a recent PYMNTS report identified three broad areas where AI is generating ROI withing finance functions -- operational, strategic and relational. Specific examples include automating manual tasks like invoice matching and payment dispute resolution, leveraging AI-driven predictive models for working capital management, and using dynamic payment terms and rapid dispute resolution to build stronger trust and loyalty among suppliers and customers.