Chilean SaaS Rocketbot raises US$500,000, plans to land in Mexico this year

Contxto – After raising US$500,000 with Manutara Ventures, Rocketbot has announced plans to expand to Mexico by the end of the year. China is also on the company’s expansion agenda by 2020. 

An unexpected phone call from Google 

Google contacted Rocketbot founders Rafael Fuentes and David Cuello in 2017 with a simple request – develop a bot to automate its advertisements. Around this time, the company was a commercial engineer programming a coupon marketplace.

Even though they were only in business for approximately 90 days at the time, Fuentes and Cuello accepted the offer.

“We never knew why they looked for us,” said Fuentes, co-founder and general manager of Rocketbot. “It was something that changed our lives.”

Out with the old, in with the new 

Fast forward two years and Rocketbot has scrapped the coupons and now focusing on its new SaaS business model. Rather than developing bots to automate processes, Rocketbot has designed a platform to accomplish this via Robotic Process Automation (RPA). 

“We stopped making robots and started delivering the platform to IT companies for them to develop and sell to other firms,” said Fuentes, who has previously attempted to run four digital ventures. 

RPA software allows companies to designate jobs and repetitive tasks to “virtual” workers. This way, partnering tech firms can streamline internal tasks more efficiently while providing their own services to other companies. 

Some of the benefits include smaller margins of error, cost reduction, higher rates of customer satisfaction, and overall more efficiency. 

“Today in companies, many people stay past their workday because there are a lot of manual tasks that require time,” added Fuentes. “We pass those tasks to a bot, which is created through Rocketbot, and it is this that does the work.”

Big plans 

As of today, Rocketbot is present in Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru. IT companies such as Sonda, Inovabiz and Codebase use its SaaS. Certain partners have gone on to implement chatbots, install robots to review credit application, as well as automatic logistics. 

Ultimately, the company envisions itself someday being worth over US$1 billion.

“We hope to become a unicorn five years from now,” said Fuentes. “We will sustain it in the explosive growth we have had. Today, we sell the developed robot, that is the business, but it is changing and we are selling our platform to other companies so that their workers develop the bots.” 

Meanwhile, Rockbot will soon arrive in Mexico and potentially China by 2020. It expects to wrap up the year with US$500,000 in sales.

-JA