Workflow automation startup Cogito gets seed funding from Kickstart

Philippine startup Cogito announced this week it received seed funding of an undisclosed sum from local investment firm Kickstart Ventures.

The startup, founded by Gian dela Rama, Aldrich Abrogena, and Jaana Abrogena, is a software-as-a-service platform that allows businesses to create and automate workflows in minutes, and connect these workflows to cloud services.

“More than the financial resources, Kickstart brings regional exposure, mentoring, and an ‘enterprise’ street cred if you will. In addition, we can learn from the diverse set of startups and founders who are part of the portfolio,” says dela Rama of its investor.

The announcement comes days after Kickstart’s parent, Globe Telecom, one of the Philippines’ largest telcos, disclosed it was injecting up to US$50 million in fresh capital into the subsidiary to support high-potential startups. The amount the group dubs as “Fund 2” is possibly the largest commitment to early-stage startup investing coming out of a Philippine company, Globe claims. It will target startups expanding anywhere in the world with clear regional and global prospects.

With the addition of Cogito, Kickstart’s investments now number over 20, says Kickstart.

A clear market need

Cogito was born out of a need of its founders. Dela Rama shares they were having a hard time hiring senior developers at their startup so they decided to build a tool that would write code based on defined specifications. Junior developers would then take the code and customize it in order to build the apps required by their clients.

“In essence, the tool built 60 percent of an app so that junior developers, who were easier to find, could then build the remaining 40 percent. Over time, we simplified the product and revamped the interface so that non-programmers can use it. The end result is Cogito as you see it today.”

Automating even the simplest manual processes is expensive and takes a lot of time. According to dela Rama, this only means that manual processes are still widespread. That’s what Cogito hopes to change.

Cogito allows companies to convert processes based on paper, email, and spreadsheet into automated workflows.

As the founders were building the platform, they realized that most of the features they wanted already existed in popular services like Google Drive or Dropbox. As such, they integrated with Zapier, an if-this-then-that tool, allowing Cogito users to build even more powerful workflows.

Dela Rama says there are at least 3,000 users accessing the platform at the moment. They hope to have 20,000 users employed in at least 100 client companies this year.

Dela Rama declines to name their biggest clients, but he says a large multinational consumer goods company is using Cogito for approval and dissemination of its marketing plans and budgets. Another client, a financial institution, is using the platform to create, approve, and deploy promotions to customers. One government institution also tapped the startup for its IT service requests and document routing.