Automat: Reinventing Automation for Ease, Reliability, and Adaptability

We at Felicis are thrilled to lead the series A in Automat, the simplest way to turn instructions into AI agents that work.

When robotic process automation (RPA) first emerged, it was a godsend for industries bogged down and bottlenecked by compliance, bureaucracy, and an endless stream of repetitive, manual tasks. Suddenly, notoriously slow industries like healthcare, financial services, and insurance were unshackled, able to move much faster and improve errors while also reducing costs. The value of the RPA industry skyrocketed. 

But as it evolved and scale, the cracks began to show. Customers have to hire certified specialists to implement and manage legacy RPAs, which makes onboarding slow and expensive. Per-bot-basis pricing coupled with high deployment costs barred a lot of prospective customers from being able to use the tools, and ballooned costs and complexity for the ones that did. And many of the automations revealed themselves to be brittle, unable to adapt to small changes, and prone to errors. 

Lucas Ochoa and Gautam Bose were working at Google’s Creative Lab and Google (X)  when they realized that another way was possible. The pair had met nearly a decade before on their first day of school at Carnegie Mellon, before being hired together as a package deal at Google’s creative lab.  It was there that they realized that they could combine robotic techniques for “text to action” with the rapidly progressing VLMs and LLMs to build an entirely new class of AI agents capable of autonomously handling tasks with much lower ongoing management and maintenance than traditional RPAs required. 

Enter Automat.  

Using Automat is shockingly easy. Customers show Automat whatever workflow they want to automate, either by screen recording or explanation, and Automat creates a custom agentic workflow to handle the task. Each agent comes with a detailed set of operating instructions, so it's easy to tailor and edit their output. The platform also makes it easy to monitor the agents’ work, both as it’s happening and synthesized into analytics, making it easy to ensure high stakes tasks are being done the right way.

Beyond its tech and ease of use, Automat’s pricing and commercialization set them apart from the legacy players. Old school RPA, require large specialist teams, and demand constant maintenance. They’re stuck squarely in an innovator’s dilemma—because offering a fully agentic managed on a subscription and usage basis as Automat does would cannibalize their existing business.

The easy onboarding and management means companies don’t need entire teams of engineers dedicated to managing it, and instead they get direct support from Automat's own forward deploy engineers. And simple subscription and usage-based pricing means the efficiencies of RPA are open to many more enterprises than previously.

Enterprise automation is a multi-hundred billion-dollar market, and we’re thrilled to back a team that’s going after it with the expertise, clarity, and ambition that the Automat team is. Lucas and Gautam are that rare combination: deeply technical but also product oriented and able to intuitively understand what their customers need, and how to bring new technology to them in a way that solves their problems with the least effort. Those are traits we’ve seen across the entire team, and that drive their early traction. 

We couldn’t be more thrilled to support a team turning a decade of technical mastery and creative vision into a platform and service that reimagines how businesses get things done. Automat is building the bridge between AI and enterprise reality and we’re honored to be part of their journey.