The Company

HuLoop Automation was founded in June 2022 through the spin-off of BeatBlip, a software test and process automation product formerly owned by AgreeYa Solutions. AgreeYa had acquired it, along with other software assets, with its 2016 acquisition of Avake Technologies Group. Now led by CEO Todd Michaud, HuLoop employs around 50 people in California and has a development location in Noida, India. This number includes associates retained from the previous ownership under AgreeYa, whose principals, Ajay Kaul and Sanjay Khosla, retain majority ownership in this new privately held entity along with the new leadership and other miscellaneous investors.

The Technology

No longer branded as BeatBlip, HuLoop Automation was renamed to emphasize its belief in the importance of the “Human-in-the-Loop” (HITL) within process and test automation – and is setting out on the path toward building an orchestration platform to manage large-scale and complex automation environments (see Figure 1). The company’s solution contains three primary offerings: data-driven process discovery, intelligent process automation (IPA), and intelligent test automation. The goal is to provide a single no-code platform for “hyperautomation,” or “enterprise orchestration” in our analysis and terminology. That may be a worthy goal, but it is highly ambitious and, at a minimum, requires many related technology components to become a reality.

To truly understand HuLoop, it’s essential to understand its roots, as although the company itself is new, the underlying technology has been around for a while. At its core, the HuLoop platform builds on its prior experiences with the BeatBlip system, which combines robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM), and testing into one platform. The critical element here, though, is continuous testing, something typically lacking in complex automation situations. And that historical ethos of continuous testing is the critical differentiator for HuLoop. Continuous testing (not occasional, or one-off) reveals what is working well and what is not, and, by definition, involves humans continuously to ensure smooth and improved operations. The testing aspect at the core of HuLoop is highly advanced and comprehensive. It can be attended or unattended, continuous or scheduled, run in parallel, etc.

Moreover, the testing encompasses everything from an RPA bot to a custom plugin. In our opinion, the firm has essentially pivoted BeatBlip into becoming an orchestration hub, and it’s a pivot that makes a great deal of sense. Coming initially from an RPA-focused view of automation, HuLoop is extending that to encompass the broader automation world of BPM, intelligent document processing (IDP), and embedded applications workflows. In addition, it has added data-driven process discovery elements provided through an OEM partnership with KYP.ai, which analyzes both historic and real-time data to provide insights into how single- and multi-system manual processes perform so that potential bottlenecks and improvements can be identified and subsequent modifications monitored. The insights that customers might gain from using KYP.ai’s platform are what HuLoop is counting on to drive use of the central tenet in its offering: intelligent process automation.

Hence, HuLoop sees its intelligent process automation platform as being able to provide orchestration across several automation capabilities, managed through a no-code studio interface, for organizations that perhaps fall below the scale where dedicated no-code suites currently serve. HuLoop’s IPA platform enables business users to assemble screen capture and data recording elements, RPA bots, IDP (through the Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer service), and data automation.

The platform is agnostic regarding where data to drive automation resides. HuLoop runs on Microsoft Azure, but the company states that it also handles data feeds from Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as required. In addition, HuLoop has ticketing connectors (including Jira, ServiceNow, and Salesforce Service Cloud) and collaboration platforms (Slack, Microsoft 365, and Google Gmail).

Currently, HuLoop says it is seeing momentum among organizations in the sub-$10 billion brackets, especially those in FMCG/CPG/retail, hospitality, and regional banks/credit unions. This interest is driven primarily by the shortage of available labor in these industries within some geographical markets and, therefore, a pragmatic desire to automate based on capacity shortfalls in vital processes.