Cogna Ltd., a UK-based enterprise resource planning startup, today announced that it has raised $15 million in fresh funding.
Notion Capital led the Series A round with participation from Hoxton Ventures and Chalfen Ventures. The raise comes a few months after Cogna closed its initial $4.75 million seed investment. The latter round included the participation of Hermann Hauser, a prominent tech entrepreneur who played a key role in launching Arm Holdings plc.
Enterprise resource planning, or ERP, platforms are complex software suites that companies use to run their day-to-day business operations. Such products' features set usually cover sales, marketing, procurement, regulatory compliance and a wide range of other use cases. Companies buy ERP software partly because it eases data management tasks such as sharing business information between departments.
The typical ERP platform can take upwards of months to deploy. Cogna, in contrast, is promising setup times as short as two weeks. This speedup partly stems from the fact that the company uses artificial intelligence to speed up certain aspects of the configuration process.
Cogna's platform ships with a chatbot-like interface powered by large language models. Workers can enter natural language descriptions of the business tasks they wish to perform more efficiently. Using the provided information, Cogna's platform generates a custom software tool capable of streaming the specified chores.
A customer could, for example, inform the platform that the accounting team is struggling to find the best way of splitting a budget among three application projects. In response, Cogna might generate an analytics tool that makes it possible to simulate different budget allocation scenarios. Workers can optionally use natural language instructions to customize the tools that the software generates.
Business planning is not the only task that Cogna promises to ease with its platform.
A company's external documents, such as contract bids submitted by suppliers, are often formatted in different ways. That complicates tasks such as identifying data entry errors. Using Cogna, a company can create a portal that allows suppliers and other third parties to submit documents in a uniform format.
Field service is another use case that the software maker is targeting. According to Cogna, organizations can leverage its platform to share data about a piece of malfunctioning equipment with the technicians sent to repair it. The company's ERP platform also lends itself to other use cases spanning human resources, regulatory compliance, customer support and several other fields.
Many of Cogna's customers operate in asset-heavy sectors such as the utility, manufacturing and construction segments. The company says that its software has helped some of those organizations realize more than $10 million in annual cost savings.
Cogna is not the only ERP startup to have raised venture funding recently. In August, Opkey nabbed a $47 million Series A round for its namesake software testing application. The tool helps companies check updates to their ERP deployments for errors before rolling out them out to production.