US-based IT process automation startup Pliant to double staff in Bulgarian office after $10m Series-A round
Bulgarian-led Pliant, a US-based IT process automation startup, plans to double its staff in Bulgaria following a successful $10m Series-A funding round last week.
“Bulgaria continues to be our strategic local for software development,” Pliant co-founder and CEO Vess Bakalov told Trending Topics SEE. “We expect our staff in Bulgaria to double as a result of our funding”, he added, noting that the expansion will cover all areas – from individual developers to management and leadership.
According to Dev.bg data, Pliant curently has 20 employees globally, including 15 IT staff in its Bulgarian office.
In a press release, Pliant said the money will go to boost the company’s go-to-market operations spanning sales, marketing, alliances, and customer success, as well as development initiatives in support of its product roadmap.
The $10m round as led by Osage Venture Partners and involved existing investors Gutbrain Ventures, VT Technology Ventures, Timothy McSweeney, BrightCap Ventures, Newfund Capital, Azure Capital Partners, NewStack Ventures, and Leading Edge Ventures.
The round followed a $2.5m investment in September last year led by Gutbrain Ventures with participation from the Bulgarian venture capital firm BrightCap Ventures, Azure Capital Partners, and Timothy McSweeney.
Expanding markets
Pliant’s low-code platform is currently mainly targeted at large financial and telecom companies and aims to help them adopt an automation-first mindset for their IT operations. “We are also making strides to make the platform even more accessible to small and medium businesses as the benefits of adopting ubiquitous automation applies equally to businesses of all sizes,” Bakalov told Trending Topics SEE.
According to a recent report from Research and Markets, the low-code market is set to reach a value of $187b by 2030, up from $10.3b in 2019. The expected over x10 growth lies in the growing pressure of IT to deliver value to businesses, accelerated by the COVID-19.
According to Bakalov, Pliant “dramatically reduces the effort for building IT automation while increasing security and performance. “By making automation easier to build and use, we can save companies 90%+ of implementation costs and decrease operations efforts by 50%+, “ he added.
Pliant in a nutshell
Pliant.io was founded in 2017 in Boston, Massachusetts, by Vess Bakalov, (CEO), fellow Bulgarian Dimitar Blagoev (CTO), and Matt Goldberg. Its platform’s vendor API code is transformed into low-code action blocks that can be used for the secure development and deployment of automation across more than 70 different technology providers. Currently, Pliant offers more than 100,000 APIs that also include all of the necessary debug code and documentation required to produce cross-domain automation.
