The nightmare unfolds in slow motion: Your contact center is running on a skeleton crew, gutted by a flu outbreak.
Then the alerts start flooding in.
Customers can’t complete their orders, their frustration building with each failed attempt. The automated responses aren’t helping, and your IT team is still hours away from finding the root cause. You can already see the damage reports: lost sales, shattered trust.
Every minute counts and you’re powerless to stop the bleeding.
But what if you weren’t?
What if you could turn to your computer right now and speak a solution into existence? Imagine asking it to identify the problem, write the exact code you need to solve it—then test, refine, and deploy it—before another customer slips away.
This isn’t fantasy. It’s generative automation for the enterprise.
And it’s brought to you by Pinkfish AI.
The innovative startup combines large language models (LLMs) with AI agents, where your wishful solution descriptions can be translated directly into production-ready code.
Norwest is excited to lead a $7.6 million pre-seed funding round that will help Pinkfish make the impossible possible.
How Two Product Leaders Solved the Enterprise Automation Gap
The key to the Pinkfish tech paradigm shift? Meld generative AI with robotic process automation (RPA). Automating business application development in this way gives business users the power to define, generate, and deploy complex code to maximize efficiency for a wide variety of enterprise processes.
Existing RPA platforms provide no-code and low-code functionality, but their capabilities for complex enterprise applications are relatively limited. The next step in automation are systems designed for generating, testing, and iterating complex enterprise application code. These systems must automatically adapt the output to changing inputs, exceptions, and events.
This gap in automation capabilities had me wondering who would create the next innovation in business process automation (BPA). It was a frequent topic during the many lunchtime meetings I had with CK Kannan and Ben Rigby, two product leaders who—like me—loved to explore solutions to business challenges through a product lens.
I had tapped CK to advise a number of startups in the Norwest portfolio by the time she introduced me to Ben, whom she had cultivated a partnership with when they were both executives at Talkdesk. Over the course of our early conversations—just three product folks talking shop about this enterprise automation challenge—I realized I was sitting across from the visionaries who would usher in the next leap forward in BPA. Pinkfish AI, the company they had co-founded, was the manifestation of that vision.
CK and Ben’s brilliant team have built a “Generative Automation” platform that incorporates AI LLMs, RPA, and an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). It provides an RPA-like workflow with AI-assisted code generation for the real-time development of multi-step business processes. I know that’s a mouthful but in its simplest terms, Pinkfish’s Generative Automation platform enables business leaders and subject matter experts to automate workflows by describing them with natural language.
This means you don’t need advanced coding skills to automate business processes. Tell the system what you want to achieve, and the Pinkfish AI agents will determine how to do it. If AI agents encounter an issue, they can discover a solution on the fly to solve it. If there’s a change in the process, they can adapt the code to handle it.
Making Every Business User a Coder
Pinkfish has literally cracked the code for enterprise self-service application development and automation. The company’s platform democratizes enterprise application automation by making it easier and more accessible to a broader range of business users. The user-friendly interface (see below) of Gen AI combined with the power and enterprise-grade reliability of LLMs enables professionals across operations, services, and business units to develop robust automations.
One of the most exciting features of the Pinkfish Generative Automation platform is its ability to self-heal the automations and integrations it codes. Say you’ve used the platform to generate code for an automation that works fine, but then an external input changes. The Generative Automation agent examines the change and recodes the process to work correctly again. Typically, this would entail an exhaustive back-and-forth with IT teams to define the change, enter the change tickets, and finally develop and release the new code. That could take weeks.
Pinkfish has automated the correction almost immediately. It delivers the kind of R&D efficiency that organizations need to stay competitive.
Pinkfish has literally cracked the code for enterprise self-service application development and automation.
A Growth Opportunity in Customer Call Centers, and Beyond
Pinkfish’s initial product is a Generative Automation platform serving backend customer support automation use cases. (Remember our nightmare contact-center scenario?) In this rapidly growing space, Generative Automation can unlock significant time savings and bolster call center resources to deliver higher customer satisfaction. Precedence Research, for example, estimates that the global Gen AI in the customer service market was valued at $483 million in 2024 and will surpass $4.5 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 25.1 percent. Pinkfish aims to target the mid-market and enterprise segments with their initial AI product.
CK and Ben have deep experience in this technology space from their executive leadership roles at Talkdesk. Serving as CPTO, CK grew the company from Series A to a $10-billion valuation in six years. Norwest, among other VC firms, is investing in Pinkfish because we firmly believe in the company’s groundbreaking technology, the people driving the innovations, and the significant market it addresses. I look forward to serving on the Pinkfish board of directors and continuing to work closely with CK, Ben, and their team to ensure they have the resources they need to bring this remarkable technology to the market.
The power of Gen AI combined with precision coding automation helps organizations automate processes that used to take weeks—in moments. With Pinkfish, innovation isn’t just a goal. It’s an everyday reality.
Want to learn more about Norwest investments in AI innovators like Pinkfish? Contact me via email or LinkedIn.
