According to Business Insider, workflow software startup Scribe has raised $75 million in a Series C round at a $1.3 billion valuation, led by StepStone. The company, co-founded by CEO Jennifer Smith and CTO Aaron Podolny, offers two main products: Scribe Capture, which auto-documents processes, and the newer Scribe Optimize, which analyzes those workflows to suggest AI automation opportunities. Scribe claims 75,000 customers, including 44% of the Fortune 500, and has been unusually capital efficient, not spending any of its previous $25 million raise from 2024. The new funding will accelerate Optimize’s rollout and fund follow-on products.
The Missing Ingredient
Here’s the thing: Scribe’s core pitch is brutally simple, and it’s probably right. CEO Jennifer Smith’s line, “AI can’t improve what it can’t see,” cuts through a ton of the hype. Right now, a huge chunk of corporate AI initiatives are failing because they’re trying to automate chaos. You can’t just plug ChatGPT into your customer service department and hope for the best. You need to know what your best agents actually do, step-by-step, across a dozen different apps. Scribe Capture is basically building that foundational map of “institutional know-how” that most companies have never formally documented. Without that map, AI is just guessing.
More Than Just Screenshots
But the real bet here is on Scribe Optimize and that database of 10 million documented workflows. That’s the secret sauce. It’s one thing to document your own messy process. It’s another to have an AI analyze it and say, “Hey, 500 other companies handle this step with this specific automation, and it saves them 3 minutes per ticket.” That’s the kind of prescriptive insight that moves from being a nice documentation tool to a must-have system for operational leaders. It turns Scribe from a librarian into a consultant. And with that $75 million war chest, they’re going to be pushing that Optimize narrative hard to every enterprise that’s feeling AI FOMO but doesn’t know where to start.
Capital Efficiency and The Road Ahead
Now, the fact that Scribe didn’t touch its last $25 million is fascinating. In this funding environment, that’s a massive signal of strength and discipline. It tells you they have real product-led growth and a clear path to revenue, not just a cool idea burning venture cash. So what’s the $75M for? Speed. They see a massive window to own the “AI implementation layer” before the big platform players (think Salesforce, ServiceNow) fully bake this capability in-house or before a dozen other startups catch up. They need to get Optimize embedded and become the de facto system of record for business processes. If they can do that, the data asset they build becomes a monstrous moat. But it’s a race. Can they scale the product and the sales motion fast enough? That’s the $1.3 billion dollar question.
