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

Opkey, a startup that helps corporations 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 corporate’s total outside funding now stands at $59 million.

Enterprise resource planning, or ERP, platforms, are complex applications that corporations depend on to administer their backoffice operations. A corporation’s ERP software is often utilized by the accounting team and several other other departments to perform their day-to-day work. Those business units also store their data of their software.

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

Before corporations upgrade to a new edition of their ERP software, they perform tests to make sure the update won’t cause technical issues. The method can take a big period of time for giant enterprises with complex, heavily customized ERP deployments. Opkey has developed a platform that guarantees to streamline the workflow. 

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

Corporations typically don’t test their ERP software by hand, but quite create scripts that simulate user activity to search out issues. Many organizations have a library of tried-and-tested scripts that they’ve accrued through the years.

In keeping with Opkey, its platform can scan an organization’s script library and discover potential gaps. The software could, for instance, determine if a corporation’s existing testing workflows don’t thoroughly scan the procurement module of its ERP system. From there, developers can use Opkey to construct latest tests that address those shortcomings. 

The corporate provides a catalog of greater than 30,000 test workflows to save lots of customers the trouble of constructing all the things from scratch. It also provides a man-made intelligence chatbot, dubbed Wilfred, that permits users to create latest tests with natural language prompts. A employee could, for instance, ask the bot to create a script that evaluates the forms in an ERP platform’s interface to make sure they work appropriately. 

When corporations add a brand new feature to an ERP environment, checking the feature for bugs shouldn’t be all the time enough to avoid technical issues. Developers must also run tests to be sure that the change won’t break the platform’s other capabilities. Opkey says its platform lends itself to this task as well.

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

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