CDK Global Leads $45M Investment in Ripcord to Modernize the Car Buying Process

HAYWARD, Calif., Feb. 25, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ripcord, the world's first robotics digitization company, today announced an additional $45 million in Series B2 funding, increasing the company's total funding to over $120 million as the business focuses on scaling globally. The funding was led by CDK Global CDK, a leading retail automotive technology company, who will partner with Ripcord to drive digital transformation across the automotive industry and modernize the car buying process. Existing Ripcord investors Kleiner Perkins, GV, Steve Wozniak, Silicon Valley Bank, Lux Capital, Tyche Partners, Icon Ventures and Baidu participated with strong support in the Series B2 funding.

Car dealerships face increasing challenges with consumer privacy concerns and legacy business processes that rely heavily on inefficient manual, time intensive forms. To further complicate problems, the information from both paper and digital forms typically funnels into multiple disparate and totally disconnected systems, compounding data compliance and processing issues.

CDK Global is investing in Ripcord to streamline the car buying experience. CDK Global and Ripcord together enable solutions that will improve both the consumer and dealer experience by saving time, reducing errors, and driving down costs throughout the car buying process. For dealerships, Ripcord provides added intelligence that helps them buy, sell, service and finance cars more competitively and with reduced processing costs – ultimately leading to better prices for the consumer and higher profit margins for dealers.

"CDK Global strives to help dealers improve the customer experience in a digital-driven world, and Ripcord's intelligent approach to digitization supports our vision and benefits both dealerships and consumers tremendously," said Brian Krzanich, president and CEO, CDK Global.

Ripcord is on a mission to digitize the earth and usher in a green, paperless era with its vision-guided robots and advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Ripcord digitizes business processes that still rely on paper, and automates and modernizes customer workflows to bring efficiency and cohesion to time-intensive processes and disconnected systems. Most of the recorded knowledge of human history is exiled in paper, and Ripcord leverages its intelligent software to free that information to make it searchable and accessible to everyone. Ripcord provides the highest speed and accuracy in the industry, and creates streamlined and more automated processes that translate to increased profits for businesses, greater time savings for consumers, and reduced costs across the entire digital ecosystem.

"Once you pick a car, all you want to do is drive it off of the lot, but today, there is a mountain of repetitive paperwork and manual data entry blocking the exit," said Alex Fielding, founder and CEO of Ripcord. "Together with CDK's expertise in automotive and our unmatched digitization capabilities with intelligent robotics and cutting edge software, we are going to get new car owners on the road more quickly and help dealers perfect compliance and earn greater margins. With this new financing, we'll continue to expand our offering and transform additional vertical markets across North America and globally."

Ripcord drives digital transformation across every industry, and works with notable brands such as Coca Cola, BP and Chevron, MUFG Bank, UCLA, Cantium, and a number of Fortune 100 companies, including three of the top five financial services and three of the top five insurance companies.

For more information about Ripcord, please visit www.ripcord.com.

Investor Supporting Quotes:
"Every industry, and especially highly regulated industries, faces a daunting challenge to keep sensitive information private, and data trapped in paper makes it even harder to track," said Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple and advisor and investor in Ripcord. "Ripcord has solved this problem and is completely transforming the customer experience for every business, and the company is primed to capture a greater share of the market with its robotics and AI-driven technologies."

"As more businesses go digital, they need help shifting from paper to digital processes and that's where Ripcord comes in," said Wen Hsieh, General Partner at Kleiner Perkins. "Through its smart robotics technology Ripcord augments digital transformation by liberating data from paper and making this information digitally accessible. We see Ripcord poised for even greater growth as it scales to new geographies and verticals."

About CDK Global, Inc.
With $2 billion in revenues, CDK Global CDK is a leading global provider of integrated information technology solutions to the automotive retail and adjacent industries. Focused on enabling end-to-end automotive commerce, CDK Global provides solutions to dealers in more than 100 countries around the world, serving approximately 30,000 retail locations and most automotive manufacturers. CDK solutions automate and integrate all parts of the dealership and buying process, including the acquisition, sale, financing, insuring, parts supply, repair and maintenance of vehicles. Visit cdkglobal.com.

About Ripcord
Ripcord is transforming the $62 billion records management, RPA, MPS, and ECM space through robots that scan, index and categorize paper records, making them searchable in the cloud and integrated into existing business processes while better enabling RPA. Ripcord is based in California and has raised $120 million from leading investors including CDK Global, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Baidu, Lux Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, Steve Wozniak, Legend Star, Icon Ventures, Kitty Hawk, and Tyche Partners.

To learn more about Ripcord visit www.ripcord.com.

Press Contact for Ripcord:
Alex Cardenas
Highwire PR
ripcord@highwirepr.com