Startup Story about Luminai — A Prospected New Player in Robotic Process Automation Software Market

4 min readDec 11, 2022

Overview

Luminai, a rapidly growing RPA software company, has successfully completed its Series A funding round. The company was founded by a young and talented person, Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran. In this article, we explore the company’s origins, its market positioning, and why capital is flowing into the company.

Company Introduction

Luminai creates software to automate workflow, specially for people who jump between applications to complete their work, its target is to eliminate repetitive manual work that takes multiple steps [1]. It was formerly known as Digital Brain from YC 2020 [2].

Founder Story

The founder of Luminai is Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran [3]. He is a passionate serial entrepreneur. From the story collected across the Internet, he loves life, he has a great sense of innovation and action.

As a teenager, Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran broke the Guinness World Record for number of Rubik’s cubes solved in one hour with 290, which was 80 more than the previous record [3]. He also has YouTube channel years ago about his cubic techniques: SQUAPEGUY.

Silk Road Cycle Trip & HitcherHub

At the age of 16, Kesava completed a cycling trip from the United World College campus in Bosnia to China. The intent of the trip was he noticed that many of his community members held negative stereotypes about citizens from surrounding countries. Along the trip, they knocked on people’s doors, introduced themselves, asked for house hosting. He was surprised how people’s perceptions about these countries went crazily different. [5] His story reached more than 7 million people.

After the trip, he created HitchHub, a social network that connects travelers from the world from around the world. His ambition was to promote culture homogenization, and make the world more peaceful and sustainable.

Learn more about this trip in his TED video:

Silicon Valley Life & Luminai

Kesava arrived in California young. He made a living and paid for bills by participating and winning Hachathons.

In one of the Hackathon he won, he created DigitalBrain. One feature of the software was built upon customer service platforms like Zendesk, to automate a series of steps for a user into a single click. This feature later grew into Luminai, which enriches the RPA-like feature (Robotic Process Automation).

Fund Raising

DigitalBrain successfully raised 3.4 million[2], which allowed Kesava focus on the development of the software. After the latest Series A fundraising, the total amount Luminai has raised has reached nearly 20 million [6].

Market Size & Competitors

From this article [7], the global robotic process automation market size hit USD 7.11 billion in 2021. The market valuation is expected to increase from USD 10.01 billion in 2022 to USD 43.52 billion by 2029 at a healthy CAGR of 23.4% over 2022–2029.

Here is a list of the head RPA companies and their market capital (may not be latest):

UiPath 6.8B
Blue Prism 1.4B
Automation Anywhere 6.8B
WorkFusion 1.3B

Other than the above big ones, there are also countless new startups that are entering RPA area.

Unlike other established companies in the RPA space, Luminai is focusing its efforts on developing solutions specifically for customer service professionals. The company’s software is designed to be integrated with existing customer service tools, and aims to automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks that are commonly encountered by CS workers.

Their customer described the software “like a macro on steroids”. [8]

Why Luminai Is Favoured?

The RPA market is a rapidly growing industry, with significant opportunities for new startups to gain a share of the market. Luminai, with its focus on customer service, is well-positioned to capitalize on this trend and continue its growth.

Coming to the founder Kesava, from a past interview video the founder Kesava, he showed great passion and faith in what he is working on. Although there are no publicly available videos of Kesava’s presentations to Y Combinator or at hackathons, it is likely that his speeches were inspiring and resonated with his audience.