Rewst Scores $31M In Funding To Grow Automation Product For MSPs

‘The large players come out with their automation platforms, one could guess that they're probably going to play best in their ecosystems of products,’ says Aharon Chernin, Rewst CEO. ‘We always want to be an independent third party. We want to support all the PSAs you could ever select from, we want to support all the RMMs you could ever select from. We're not going to pick a winner.’

Rewst, a startup developer of robotic process automation technology aimed specifically at smaller MSPs, has secured $31 million in Series B funding to expand its product and robotic operations center (ROC) teams. The funding will also go towards customer success and educating MSPs about the platform.

The ROC team, which will double in size to about 30 people, will allow Tampa, Fla-based Rewst to give faster response times to MSPs. MSPs will also be contributing to the marketplace of pre-built automations that they can use to automate more of their environments.

“A lot of platforms today, whether or not they are automation or not, kind of leave it to the MSP to get to success all by themselves,” Rewst CEO Aharon Chernin told CRN. “The ROC is there at a moment's notice. [MSPs] can ask our ROC team a question about an automation they're building and get a very technical response to make sure that their automations actually are working and running within the platform. These ROC folks also build automations that are in our marketplace. Increasing the ROC team size will help make MSPs happier.”

Chernin said if MSPs want to scale, they must use an automation platform.

“It does not replace people. In fact, we tell MSPs all the time that if you threaten your employees with automation they won't automate,” he said. “They're the ones building the automations for you. If you go to your team and say, ‘If you automate the boring stuff, you can focus on the hard stuff.’ Your team's going to want to focus on the hard stuff.”

The funding was led by Meritech Capital, which joined existing investors OpenView, TDF Ventures and Florida Funders. To date, Rewst has secured $59 million in funding since launching in 2020.

The money will also go towards Rewst’s App platform, which is a low-code application builder for designing apps, enabling end users to interact with Rewst with generated workflows, forms and data. As an extension of Rewst’s automation platform, App platform enhances efficiency, consistency and visibility and helps MSPs differentiate themselves through front-end experiences. The platform is expected to be in beta shortly with a full product release expected early this year, Chernin said.

“It’s an entirely new product built on top of Rewst,” Chernin said. “To be able to support an App platform, I need to staff it, I need education around it and documentation. There'll be a lot of investment in App platform.”

Jared Brantley, director of DevOps at Cumming, Georgia-based MSP Snap Tech IT, said he’s “really looking forward to the future with Rewst” as he’s already been testing the App platform features.

“App platform is going to be a game changer in what we can provide to our clients in the form of web apps,” he told CRN. “The sheer growth I’ve seen in the product from features to help content to organizational size has been nothing short of impressive. Aharon has assembled an outstanding team to drive Rewst forward and the focus the team has placed on supporting partners is unprecedented in our space. It’s clearly obvious that the Rewst team love what they do and believe in what they do.”

In 12 to 18 months, Chernin expects to see MSPs collaborating more with each other when it comes to automation, but Brantley said he is already seeing that today.

“I don’t think this is a future prediction. It’s here now,” he said. “There’s an official Rewst Discord channel where partners are already collaborating and sharing tips, tricks or entire workflows in some cases.”

Chernin said one big differentiator about Rewst is that it’s not just giving MSPs a list of prebuilt automations.

“Does Rewst have prebuilt automations? Yes,” he said. “But those automations are a lot of times used as inspiration. We initially went to market as a list of automations and as we talked to MSPs they said, ‘My operations are slightly different than the way your automation works. How do I fix that?’ You could install one of our prebuilt ones and then tweak it, make it your own and make it as customizable as you need.”

And the goal is to integrate with all PSA (professional service automation) and RMM (remote monitoring and management) platforms.

“The large players come out with their automation platforms, one could guess that they're probably going to play best in their ecosystems of products,” Chernin said. “We always want to be an independent third party. We want to support all the PSAs you could ever select from, we want to support all the RMMs you could ever select from. We're not going to pick a winner.”