Get in on the disruptor action with HFS Hot Vendor picks

The Bottom Line: To see the rising stars of the post-pandemic digital future, pay attention to the HFS Hot Vendors

The world is awash with wannabee start-ups and scale-ups. HFS analysts pick our Hot Vendors with care, validate them with real customers, and turn a spotlight on those we think can really make a difference.

We’re launching a dedicated Hot Vendors section on our website where you’ll find all our reports, our mighty compendium of every Hot Vendor to date, and links to our recorded Hot Vendor Fireside podcasts.

If you want a glimpse of success in the future, look no further.

It’s been a hot year for the HFS OneOffice™ Hot Vendors. The market has been readily validating HFS analysts’ Hot Vendor picks with a flurry of investments and acquisitions.

The HFS OneOffice Hot Vendors are an exclusive group of emerging players, each with a differentiated value proposition for the OneOffice.

HFS analysts regularly speak with numerous exciting start-ups and emerging players. We designate a select group as the HFS Hot Vendors based on their offerings’ distinctiveness, ecosystem robustness, client impact, financial position, and the impact in our OneOffice Framework. The HFS Hot Vendors may not have the scale and size to feature them in our Top 10 reports, but they have the vision and strategy to impact and disrupt the market.

Follow the money—Hot Vendors have attracted investment dollars

Q2 2021 Hot Vendor Robocorp landed $21 million in Series A funding shortly after being named a Hot Vendor. It takes an open-source approach to bringing scalable and extensible automation to the world. It may call itself RPA (robotic process automation), surfing whatever buzz it can, but it is actually a Python-based automation tool that is cloud-native and API-led, using UI-based (user interface-based) automation only as a last resort. Its developer focus and consumption-based pricing model challenge established RPA norms.

Automation management platform RPA Supervisor landed an additional $5 million in funding shortly after being named in the Q2 2021 Hot Vendor cohort. Going forward, the company name comes into question… but not for a bad reason! In partnering with UiPath and exploring Power Automate and Appian, the phrase “Automation Supervisor” starts to look more descriptive.

In October, evoluteIQ accessed more capital for growth. We had just named it as a Q3 2021 Hot Vendor. Its e.IQ platform enables the enterprise to deliver integrated customer journeys across disparate, often legacy technologies and processes to support the orchestration of an end-to-end digital workflow across customer, front office, and back-office systems.

And in November, Q4 2020 Hot Vendor Workato secured Series E funding of $200 million to continue its “integrate your stack and automate your work” success story. It is poised to use the investment to make acquisitions and invest further in its platform with one eye on a future IPO.

qBotica, a Q4 2019 Hot Vendor, took its first $1 million in seed funding. The RPA and intelligent document processing services provider will use the funds to expand its team, seek new distribution channels, and extend its range of services.

Accenture, Microsoft, and NTT DATA have all come knocking

Clear Software was acquired by Microsoft. We singled out the Q3 2019 Hot Vendor for its focus on helping enterprises get more out of their investments in enterprise software through intuitive process design, data integration, and automation. Its product approach is like gene-splicing process reengineering, UX design, API integration, and RPA together into a whole new, undefined category of software product. Microsoft wants to use Clear Software integrations to make it a more seamless experience to use Power Apps and Power Automate to build business applications and automations over systems such as SAP and Oracle. It comes with more than 100 pre-built abstractions.

Q1 2018 Hot Vendor Nexient was acquired by NTT DATA Services, giving NTT DATA scale in agile application development and modernization capabilities in the US. Nexient stood out as a software development services firm that applied agile and DevOps approaches using rapid, iterative, value-focused development cycles focused on the end-user experience. Its product-centered approach delivers digital innovation at pace.

BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions was acquired by Accenture. BRIDGEi2i combines data engineering, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators, and consulting services to help enterprises drive insights. We named it an HFS Hot Vendor in Q3 2020.

Nimbella, a recent Hot Vendor in Q2 2021, was acquired by Digital Ocean. The cloud native-championing start-up based in Santa Clara, CA, promises a serverless platform that is portable across clouds, integrates foundational cloud-native services seamlessly, and works with Kubernetes. Its small and midmarket company focus found a glove-like fit with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings from DigitalOcean.

We even had a case of two Hot Vendors coming together: Ashling Partners, a Q4 2020 Hot Vendor, joined forces with Q3 2019 Hot Vendor Machina in a process automation services merger supported with growth capital funding. Machina becomes part of the Ashling story. The move stands Ashling in good stead as the market consolidates and pureplay automation services businesses target the kind of reassuring scale that enterprises tend to rely on.

Did somebody say Celonis? Which Hot Vendor will be the next decacorn?

Of course, we can’t close without mentioning what looks like the software success story of the year, Celonis. Named an HFS Hot Vendor in Q4 2018, the process intelligence leader raised $1 billion in series D funding on an $11 billion valuation in June this year. It seems like this may be a good time to take a browse through our Hot Vendors and consider which has the legs to be the next decacorn.