The mid-market gap

There is a size of business that automation has mostly skipped.

Small teams get by on spreadsheets and goodwill; the person who knows the process is in the room. Large enterprises hire a systems integrator, run a two-year programme and staff a team to maintain what comes out of it.

In between sits most of the economy: businesses with a few hundred people, a handful of core systems and processes that have outgrown the person who used to hold them together.

What the gap looks like

You can see it in the week of an operations team:

• the same data typed into two systems because they do not talk to each other,
• a shared inbox that only one person knows how to triage,
• approvals that wait for a Friday because that is when the manager catches up.

None of it is large enough for a programme. All of it together is a meaningful share of the payroll.

Why it stayed open

The tools that could close it were built for one of the two ends. Consumer automation tools are easy to start and hard to trust with money. Enterprise platforms are trustworthy and take a department to run.

What we are building for

We think the gap closes with workflows that are as dependable as an enterprise system and as quick to stand up as a spreadsheet — run for you, priced by what they get done. That is the business we are in, and it is a big, hopeful one.