RPA weekly for Tuesday, May 19th, 2020
RPA startup FortressIQ raises $30 million
Fortress makes a Virtual Process Analyst (VPA), which as their CEO explains “basically replaces high-level human consultants who perform time and motion studies. The cloud-hosted tool captures videos of processes, and AI tools watch the videos and transcribe them into software interactions. Data mining ensures that if the person whose actions were captured became distracted by another task, the noise can be filtered out automatically.”
Microsoft's venture arm, M12, led the round.
More analysis from Tom Taulli at Forbes
RPA Labs lands $1.2M pre-seed funding
Their focus is building RPA bots for the supply chain industry that “work out of the box”. The round was led by Schematic Ventures (SF) with participation by PSA unboxed (Singapore), both supply chain focused venture firms.
Things to consider before starting your career as RPA Developer
A nice quick write up by Daniel James on things to consider before jumping into a career in RPA.
Weekly Feature: A look at Open Source RPA
This week we’re going to take a look at open source RPA tools. While many of the larger RPA platforms have money to spend on marketing, open source tools often get overlooked. However, that’s changing as open source RPA companies take venture funding and start to gain traction in the enterprise.
Let’s start with Nandan Mullakara’s list of the top 5 open source RPA tools. But what’s better than a top 5 list? A top 6 list of course. And if that’s still not enough, we’ll finish it off with a top 10 list that stretches the definition a bit.
TagUI — CLI tool for digital process automation
Ken Soh, the creator of TagUI, walks us through how it works along with some videos of it in action.
Robot Framework Introduction with Pekka Klärck (video)
An interview with the creator of Robot Framework which serves as a great introduction to the tool. If you want to dive into the code, check out the Robot Framework site or this Edureka article.
A demonstration using Robin to extract web data and how to build automation script in C#. Official Robin Docs here, and the source can be found on Github. Also check out this video interview with the Robin product owner, James Papadimitriou.
How to get started with Automagica Open Source RPA v2.0 (video)
Automagica is a python based RPA tool which comes with a lot of great features out of the box. Check out their Github page for help getting started and some example bots.
Demo and interview with OpenRPA founder Allan Zimmermann (video)
OpenRPA is based on Microsoft Workflow Foundation so it resembles commercial RPA tools. While many other open source RPA tools focus on coding, OpenRPA takes a different approach and tries to compete with more low-code offerings.
