Scribe hits $1.3B valuation as it moves to show where AI will actually pay off

After helping several companies document how work actually happens, Writer has raised $75 million at a post-money valuation of $1.3 billion to roll out Scribe Optimize, a platform that maps workflows across the enterprise to reveal where automation and AI will actually deliver returns – instead of becoming another sunk cost.

The all-equity Series C round was led by StepStone, with participation from existing investors Amplify Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Tiger Global, Morado Ventures and New York Life Ventures. The new funding comes more than a year after Scribe raised its $25 million Series B, capital that the five-year-old startup has largely not needed, co-founder and CEO Jennifer Smith (pictured above, left) said in an exclusive interview. With this round, Scribe plans to accelerate the rollout of Scribe Optimize and related products as companies struggle to determine where AI and automation will have the biggest impact.

Many companies are rushing to adopt AI, but Smith told TechCrunch that most companies still can’t answer a fundamental question: What should we automate first? Companies often try to find the answer through interviews, workshops or by bringing in consultants, she said. An approach that takes months to complete and still misses a lot of what people actually do on a daily basis.

“Without really knowing how the work is done, it’s very difficult to know where you can improve it, where you can automate it, and where agents can help,” she said. “Scribe Optimize is all about answering that question. Quite simply, it analyzes across all workflows what people are doing while they’re working, and then abstracts that so you can see in one window the actual workflows that are running. Here you can see how often, how long it takes, and so on.”

Founded in 2019 by Smith and Aaron Podoln (CTO) (pictured above, right), Scribe started before the GenAI boom, and its current flagship product, Scribe Capture, helps automatically document how work gets done. When someone completes a process or workflow, Capture generates a step-by-step guide using the browser extension and desktop app, along with text and screenshots. These guides can be shared with colleagues or embedded in internal tools to reduce repetitive queries, minimize errors and speed onboarding.

Customers who use Scribe Capture report saving 35 to 42 hours per person per month and hiring 40% faster, according to the startup.

The process documentation market includes players such as Tango, Iorad, UserGuiding and Spekit. Still, Smith told TechCrunch that Scribe is competing with the status quo of people manually capturing workflows.

“People still use stopwatches to sit behind someone and understand what this process is,” she said. “Even now, when it comes to deploying AI agents, the irony is that the process of deploying agents is incredibly manual.”

To date, Scribe has documented more than 10 million workflows for 40,000 software applications. The startup said it has more than 5 million users and is used by teams within 94% of Fortune 500 companies. Furthermore, 78,000 organizations are paid customers. It counts teams from New York Life, T-Mobile, LinkedIn, Hubspot and Northern Trust among its users.

“Users come to Scribe not because their boss says so, but because they want to,” Smith told TechCrunch. “It starts with the end user and then goes up to their team leader, department leader and then some kind of central function who are all interested in it because of the question: how can we scale, what we know, how we need to do and how can we get better?”

The San Francisco-based startup considers Britain, Canada, Australia and Europe to be its largest markets after the US

Scribe said it has more than doubled its revenue in the past year, although it did not disclose figures, and also said its valuation has increased fivefold since the last round. The startup currently has a workforce of 120 employees and plans to double that number in the next 12 months, Smith said.