FormHero announced its rebrand to Daylight Automation Inc., along with a $12.3 million USD ($15.7 million CAD) Series A funding round on September 21.
RTP Global, Bessemer Venture Partners and Golden Ventures led the round. Daylight will use the funding to support its rebrand, accelerate hiring, and advance product development and marketing initiatives in the United States (US) and Canada. The round closed in late March 2021.
“Our first clients were two of the largest banks here in Canada … even when we were just a two-person startup, they saw that value on day one.”
The round follows a $2.26 million USD ($2.9 million CAD) round in March 2020. Both Bessemer and Golden Ventures invested in that round as well.
“We really had continuity from our seed round right through the Series A with our investors believing in what we accomplished and what they still believe we can accomplish,” said Art Harrison, co-founder and chief growth officer of Daylight. Ryan Kimber is Daylight’s other co-founder, and the company’s CEO.
Daylight offers a low-code platform that allows businesses to rapidly build and deploy personalized digital solutions. Harrison told BetaKit that companies typically invest a lot of money into core processes such as a mobile application or customer onboarding.
However, many smaller processes branch off or work in between the larger applications. “What we’re doing is creating consistency for IT and data teams so they have one source of data flowing in as a host to all these disparate solutions across the board,” Harrison said.
“Daylight is changing the current paradigm with a dynamic digital interface that efficiently and securely transforms customer data and delivers it back to the organization in the desired format and location, allowing IT teams to focus their skills and resources on downstream integration of data and processes,” according to Julius Schwerin, a partner at RTP Global.
Daylight’s main customers come from banking, insurance, and the pharmaceutical industry. They include BMO, Manulife, and Shoppers Drug Mart.
“From day one, our first clients were two of the largest banks here in Canada,” Harrison said. “Even when we were just a two-person startup, they saw that value on day one.”
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Harrison said the company is now expanding aggressively into the US. The Toronto-based firm began in 2016, and currently numbers 90 employees. Harrison wants to double that figure by 2022.
The rebranding of FormHero to Daylight came about because Harrison discovered that the former name didn’t reflect the nature of their product. “With the name FormHero, we were pigeon-holed as a form solution,” Harrison said, adding that customers knew the company provided much more than digital forms, but internally some customer team members didn’t, and would push back on using FormHero. “That was one of the primary drivers to this rebrand as Daylight Automation,” Harrison added.
In fact, Daylight’s software provides IT teams with the security, compliance and control, but allows subject matter experts in companies to build their optimum experience.
Organizations are using Daylight’s low-code platform to streamline external processes from credit card applications and insurance claims to internal processes that create consistency across every branch and employee experience.
“Daylight has developed an easy-to-use platform that is critical to the success of operations for companies all over the world,” said Alex Ferrara, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “It is designed to solve complex processes and data challenges that are often overlooked resulting in wasted costs.”
Harrison said a lot of people don’t get to see their work make a meaningful impact. “We’re taking these problematic processes: moving money, dealing with my health, dealing with a claim … and usually within three, six, eight weeks something built on our platform is live, and it’s simplifying how people have those interactions.”