If your business is still figuring out how best to use AI — and aren’t all of ours? — one important consideration to start is data.

What of your company’s data will be useful for AI, where is it stored, how secure is it, who has access, and how can it be properly organized and formatted for secure use in AI applications? And also, importantly, how does it move around inside and outside of your organization? What processes is your business even undertaking that could potentially benefit from AI automation?

Answering these questions is no easy feat, especially when the average business globally uses around 112 (!) different enterprise software tools and applications (according to Statista research dated 2023).

Enter 8flow, a startup founded in 2022 by former ServiceNow vets, which today is announcing $10 million in a strategic investment round to accelerate its mission of helping businesses automate complex workflows through AI.

“Each enterprise has its own set of business applications—hundreds or thousands,” said Boaz Hecht, co-founder and CEO of 8Flow, in a video call interview with VentureBeat recently. “Something needs to map it all and give the AI the context so it can run workflows across them.”

The round is led by Caffeinated Capital, with participation from ServiceNow Ventures, Okta, HNVR, and strategic angel investors.

Evolving businesses to get their datasets ready for use in AI apps

8Flow provides enterprise customers with infrastructure for mapping and analyzing internal workflows.

The company’s technology creates a structured foundation that enables AI agents to automate tasks traditionally managed by human operators, with a strong emphasis on support and back-office operations.

The investment signals growing interest in agentic AI applications—intelligent systems capable of performing tasks autonomously—especially in large-scale, fragmented enterprise environments.

Hecht said that agentic AI as a natural evolution of today’s automation tools—but one that still needs a crucial missing piece: enterprise context.

“The way agentic AI is going to happen is the technology will evolve and get better. But once it’s able to run workflows by itself—meaning, reasoning as it runs—something will need to give it the context of a specific enterprise.”

Hecht also explained that 8Flow is focused not on replacing AI action providers like OpenAI or AWS, but on powering their effectiveness inside enterprise systems.

“We’re not trying to build the AI actions themselves. The big players—OpenAI, AWS, etc.—will do that. We’re building the intelligence behind it that tells the AI what to do and why.”

Bridging the gap between AI potential and business readiness

8Flow’s platform captures and processes real-world data to guide AI agents through existing business processes.

By observing, analyzing, and optimizing human behaviors, the company enables enterprises to train and deploy AI agents more effectively and with minimal disruption. This approach addresses a key challenge in enterprise automation: making workflows intelligible and actionable for AI.

Raymond Tonsing, managing partner at lead investor Caffeinated Capital, noted in a press release that while many enterprises are eager to adopt AI, they face a fundamental problem—preparing their operations for automation.

He emphasized that companies need support to redesign workflows in a way that sets up AI agents for success, and describes 8Flow as well-positioned to help accomplish this.

A map of your workflows and data

The company draws a comparison to Waze, the GPS app that revolutionized driving by capturing driver behavior and routing data. Similarly, 8Flow’s platform aims to audit, organize, and optimize enterprise workflow data to support intelligent automation.

Hecht reinforces the analogy by comparing 8Flow’s role to the kind of contextual mapping required in autonomous driving.

“Think of it like Tesla building self-driving cars. If it didn’t have Waze, it wouldn’t know where to drive. It needs context—where to start, where to finish, how to handle points of interest. Enterprises need the same.”

8Flow sets itself apart by focusing on applied AI tailored to specific enterprise functions, rather than generic automation approaches. The platform has tracked over 600 million workflow events to date and is nearing the one billion mark. Through this large dataset, the company is able to deliver actionable insights for tasks ranging from password resets to managing end-to-end customer support operations.

According to Hecht, the company’s product philosophy is to give AI tools actionable insights without aiming to reinvent what others are already building.

“The assumption is that cloud providers will offer the action capabilities. What we’re providing is the mapping—the reasoning behind actions at scale in an enterprise.”

Real-world industry usage

Customers are already seeing value. Sam Collier, CIO at OP360, highlights the benefit of gaining real-time visibility into agent workflows—an area that previously relied on time-consuming, manual analysis. Collier believes the partnership with 8Flow will unlock new ways to improve efficiency and redefine intelligent automation.

With integrations into systems like ServiceNow and Salesforce, 8Flow’s platform allows companies to maintain visibility into both human and AI activity across their support and operational environments. The backing from enterprise technology leaders ServiceNow and Okta further strengthens 8Flow’s position as a foundational player in the shift toward AI-native business infrastructure.

As enterprises increasingly turn to autonomous agents to manage internal workflows and customer interactions, the strategic support for 8Flow suggests rising demand for intelligent, data-driven automation tools that fit the real-world complexity of enterprise systems.