Rewst CEO On Raising $45M In Funding: ‘We’re Growing Super, Super Quickly’
‘I don't think we’re ever done when it comes to improving the platform. I think it can continue to get better year over year as we master automation with MSPs’ says Aharon Chernin, Rewst founder and CEO.
Automation platform company Rewst has secured $45 million in funding to accelerate the pace of innovation in its robotic process automation platform while investing in community, education and support for MSPs after seeing triple-digit growth in the past year.
“We have this new App Platform that we’ve been building,” Aharon Chernin, Rewst founder and CEO, told CRN. “We need to put more education content out to teach folks how to leverage it as well as build an initial set of apps for folks within the app platform. We have a number of what we call, ‘crates,’ or prebuilt automations, and we’re creating and expanding a team dedicated to just building prebuilt automations for our clients.”
The App Platform is a low-code module for building branded web apps that unify multiple underlying tools, data, forms and automations into a single pane of glass.
The money will also be used to improve Tampa, Fla.-based Rewst’s core automation platform.
“I don't think we’re ever done when it comes to improving the platform,” Chernin said. “I think it can continue to get better year over year as we master automation with MSPs.”
[Related: Rewst Scores $31M In Funding To Grow Automation Product For MSPs]
The Series C capital funding was led by Sapphire Ventures, with existing investors Meritech Capital and OpenView. Rewst has raised a total of $76 million in the last 12 months and $104 million since launching in 2020.
The funding also comes on the heels of the company seeing massive growth over the past year.
In the first half of 2024, annual recurring revenue grew 182 percent year over year, while total customers increased 204 percent. Rewst has stayed ahead of increasing demand by doubling its head count, building out its engineering, customer success, education and robotic operations center (ROC) teams to ship more features faster and better support its growing customer base.
The ROC team jumps into discord channels, whether they’re private client discord channels or public discord channels, to help them with automation, according to Chernin.
“We’re growing super, super quickly and so I have to hire at a very fast rate,” he said.
Funding will enable new ROC team members to provide even faster and better experiences working with the vendor’s automation experts, according to Chernin.
Rewst has about 100 employees today and plans on doubling that over the next 12 months.
“As the MSP market matures around realizing the power of automation, people are talking to each other,” he said. “They’re telling them what they’ve built, this word travels and the demand continues to pick up.”
Rewst has more than 900 MSPs partners, with a majority of them in North America and a growing base in the European Union and Asia-Pacific Japan. In total, partners have built more than 274,000 automations with Rewst. In a recent 30-day period, workflows ran more than 101 million times, with self-reported time savings exceeding 675,000 hours.
Robert Griffin, COO of Charlotte, N.C.-based MSP SparkNav, said Rewst allows his team to automate business and technical processes, which in turn enables technicians to focus on the more complex aspects of their workload.
“Rewst is leveraging the vision of Aharon Chernin and technological advancements in API connectivity to enable a growing community of MSPs to work more efficiently and accurately with automation,” he told CRN. “Without an organization like Rewst, each MSP would be forced to automate, or not automate, on their own, without a platform and community support.”
And the funding will go to even faster innovation, according to Chernin.
“One of our hallmarks is that we're quick,” he said. “We’re as quick as we can be to market. We may be the No. 1 player for MSPs when it comes to automation, but it doesn’t mean that we’re just sitting around enjoying it. It means that we need to continue to work at the same pace and deliver features and value to our customers at either the same pace or faster.”