Opkey reels in $47M to automate ERP change testing with AI – SiliconANGLE

Opkey, a startup that helps companies test the reliability of their enterprise resource planning software, has raised a $47 million investment to finance growth initiatives.

PeakSpan Capital led the Series B round. Opkey, officially Smart Software Testing Solutions Inc., detailed in its funding announcement today that UST Global, Verica, Vertical and YouNest chipped in as well. The company’s total outside funding now stands at $59 million.

Enterprise resource planning, or ERP, platforms, are complex applications that companies rely on to manage their backoffice operations. An organization’s ERP software is typically used by the accounting team and several other departments to carry out their day-to-day work. Those business units also store their data in their software.

Enabling multiple teams to store their records in one place eases certain data management tasks. If important documents are stored in a centralized ERP system, there’s no need for each department to maintain its own separate copy of the files. This lowers the risk that inconsistencies will emerge between the different departments’ copies of the data. 

Before companies upgrade to a new version of their ERP software, they carry out tests to ensure the update won’t cause technical issues. The process can take a significant amount of time for large enterprises with complex, heavily customized ERP deployments. Opkey has developed a platform that promises to streamline the workflow. 

According to the company, its platform automates much of the manual work involved in testing ERP updates. Opkey can also evaluate the reliability of integrations that link ERP software to third-party applications. A retailer, for example, could leverage the platform to stress-test an integration that syncs product availability data to a third-party inventory management application.

Companies typically don’t test their ERP software by hand, but rather create scripts that simulate user activity to find issues. Many organizations have a library of tried-and-tested scripts that they’ve accumulated over the years.

According to Opkey, its platform can scan a company’s script library and identify potential gaps. The software could, for example, determine if an organization’s existing testing workflows don’t thoroughly scan the procurement module of its ERP system. From there, developers can use Opkey to build new tests that address those shortcomings. 

The company provides a catalog of more than 30,000 test workflows to save customers the hassle of building everything from scratch. It also provides an artificial intelligence chatbot, dubbed Wilfred, that allows users to create new tests with natural language prompts. A worker could, for example, ask the bot to create a script that evaluates the forms in an ERP platform’s interface to ensure they work correctly. 

When companies add a new feature to an ERP environment, checking the feature for bugs is not always enough to avoid technical issues. Developers must also run tests to ensure that the change won’t break the platform’s other capabilities. Opkey says its platform lends itself to this task as well.

The company’s installed base includes Cigna Group, Gap Inc. and about 200 other large enterprises. It will hire more sales and marketing professionals using its newly closed funding round to further grow its customer roster. It will also invest a portion of the funding in product development with a focus on building new AI features. 

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