Laiye builds a unified platform for automating office workflows, combining conversational AI and robotic process automation to handle tasks from answering calls to processing documents. The company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Beijing. Laiye reports that its consumer and SME products are already profitable, while its enterprise/Fortune 500 segment still requires substantial investment in product development and sales. It serves nearly 200 large corporate customers and works with global consultancies such as Deloitte and KPMG; its software is available on Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud. The company claims a developer community of about 600,000 and currently generates roughly 20% of revenue outside China, with a goal to raise that to 50% by 2025 and to expand its international headcount similarly. Laiye has been hiring international executives to drive global expansion and picked Paris as a European base after acquiring chatbot provider Mindsay to accelerate language and product development. Laiye is a Beijing-based software company that develops robotic process automation (RPA) and chatbot products to mimic mundane workplace tasks like keyboard strokes and mouse clicks. Its RPA tools have been used to speed account reconciliation in Lanzhou by 75% and to automate national population census work in several southern Chinese cities. Laiye runs a free-to-use edition with over 400,000 developers and operates a bot marketplace connecting freelance developers with small businesses. The company said its RPA enterprise business achieved positive cash flow and its chatbot business turned profitable in the fourth quarter of 2020, and it has raised over $130 million to date. Laiye is led by Baidu veterans, employs about 400 staff globally with entities in China, Singapore and the U.S., and is expanding its footprint across Asia, the United States and Europe while hiring in Europe. Its stated plans include certifying at least one million software robot developers by 2025 and building the world’s largest bot marketplace within the next three years. Laiye builds an RPA platform called UiBot that automates routine enterprise tasks by mimicking human interactions and integrating AI capabilities such as NLP, OCR, computer vision, chatbots and machine learning. The company serves major tech firms and government agencies in China and counts Microsoft as an investor. UiBot is multilingual and has more than 200 partners and over 200,000 developers registered to use the platform. Laiye says it combines AI with human talent to scale automation projects and compete in a growing RPA market. The four-and-a-half-year-old startup has raised more than $100 million to date and will use new capital to hire global talent and expand its services and geographic reach. Laiye merged with Chinese RPA team Awesome Technology and launched UiBot in January as its RPA product offering. The company combines AI-enabled chatbots with RPA to let clients build bots with both “brains and hands.” Since UiBot’s launch it has collected about 300,000 downloads and 6,000 registered enterprise users. Corporate customers include Nike, Walmart, Wyeth, China Mobile and Ctrip. Laiye plans to use new funding to recruit R&D and sales talent, grow its AI capabilities beyond natural language processing, deep learning and reinforcement learning, and accelerate commercialization of its robotic solutions across industries.

Total raised

$287M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Apr 2022