Scribe’s valuation reaches $1.3 billion as it moves to show where AI will actually pay off

After helping several organizations document how the work is actually done, author It raised $75 million at a post-cash valuation of $1.3 billion to launch Scribe Optimize, a platform that maps workflows across the enterprise to reveal where automation and AI will deliver real returns — rather than becoming another sunk cost.

The all-equity Series C round was led by StepStone, with participation from existing investors Amplify Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Tiger Global, Morado Ventures and New York Life Ventures. The new funding comes more than a year after Scribe raised its contribution $25 million Series Bcapital that the five-year-old startup largely didn’t need to draw, said co-founder and CEO Jennifer Smith (pictured above, left) in an exclusive interview. With this round, Scribe plans to accelerate the rollout of Scribe Optimize and related products, as organizations struggle to identify areas where AI and automation will have the greatest impact.

Many companies are racing to adopt AI, but Smith told TechCrunch that most companies still can’t answer a basic question: What should we automate first? She said companies often try to find the answer through interviews, workshops or by hiring consultants, methods that take months and still miss much of what people actually do on a daily basis.

“Without knowing how the work is really done, it’s really hard to know where to improve, where to automate, and where agents can help,” she said. “Scribe Optimize is all about answering that question. Quite simply, it mines through workflows looking for what people are doing while they’re at work, and then summarizes them so they can show you in one pane of glass, here’s the actual workflow that’s being executed. Here’s how often, how long it takes, and so on.”

Founded in 2019 by Smith and Aaron Podolen (CTO) (pictured above, right), Scribe was started before the GenAI boom, and its current flagship product, Scribe Capture, helps document how work gets done automatically. When someone completes a process or workflow, Capture creates a step-by-step guide using a browser extension and desktop app, as well as text and screenshots. These guides can be shared with colleagues or included in internal tools to reduce repetitive questions, reduce errors, and speed up the onboarding process.

Customers using Scribe Capture report saving 35 to 42 hours per person per month and onboarding new employees 40% faster, the startup said.

The COA market includes players including Tango, Iorad, UserGuiding, and Spekit. However, Smith told TechCrunch that Scribe is competing with the status quo of people manually recording workflows.

“People still use stopwatches to sit behind someone and understand what the process is,” she said. “Even now, when it comes to deploying AI agents, the irony is that the process of deploying agents is incredibly manual.”

To date, Scribe has documented more than 10 million workflows across 40,000 software applications. The startup said it has more than 5 million users and is used by teams within 94% of Fortune 500 companies. Furthermore, 78,000 organizations are its paid customers. It counts teams at New York Life, T-Mobile, LinkedIn, Hubspot, and Northern Trust among its users.

“Users come to Scribe not because their boss tells them to, but because they want to,” Smith told TechCrunch. “It starts with the end user, then it gets to the team lead, the department head, and then kind of the central functions that are all concerned with asking, how do we scale, what do we know, how do we do, how do we get better?”

The San Francisco-based startup counts the UK, Canada, Australia and Europe among its biggest markets after the US

Scribe said it had doubled its revenue over the past year, though it did not disclose numbers, and also said its valuation had increased fivefold since its last round. The startup currently has 120 employees, and plans to double that number within the next 12 months, Smith said.