The founders of DigitalBrain have quite a back story, a pair of immigrants living in a hacker house in San Francisco, the two paid bills for a time by competing at hackathons and winning. When they came up with an idea for a business called DigitalBrain, they were able to get into Y Combinator in the Summer 2020 cohort, and they've been working to build a company ever since.

Today the company founders were rewarded for their hard work with a $16 million Series A. While they were at it, they also announced they were changing their name to Luminai.

Company co-founder Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, says the startup has come a long way since TechCrunch covered its seed round in 2020. He said the original product had around 10 features, but the one that really stuck was the RPA-like functionality that automated a series of steps for a user into a single click.

“We'd built like 10 features when we first built the product. And as we iterated with our first group of design partners and customers back then, we found essentially that one specific one became the full blown product today, which was taking any kind of multi-click, multi-step process and making it one click,” he told me.

What Luminai now does is record a video of a user jumping between different systems. "Using the Luminai recorder, we keep track of the clicks and keystrokes and our software is able to recognize if there is an API available or not, and then replicate that exact same workflow in the background.”

Dinakaran says that his customers describe it like a macro on steroids, but he says what really separates it from pure RPA tools is the ability to connect to API gateways when they are available. “What's different is that we're kind of combining RPA with traditional API-based integration,” he said.

When there’s no API, or when the company doesn’t want to grant Luminai access to the gateway for whatever reason, such as if it’s a financial gateway, then the tool can use standard RPA-style recording techniques to move through a workflow.