InstaLILY raises $60M Series B for Lily
InstaLILY raised a $60M Series B and launched Lily, an AI forward-deployed engineer that builds agents inside legacy enterprise systems.
InstaLILY AI raised a $60 million Series B led by Energize Capital, announced July 14, with Insight Partners upsizing its stake and new strategic backers Home Depot Ventures and United Rentals joining. Total funding is now near $100 million. Founders Amit Shah and Sumantro Das built the company on a bet that generic chatbots cannot handle the specific, undocumented workflows inside distribution, industrial, and field-service businesses.
Alongside the round, InstaLILY launched Lily, which it calls the world’s first AI forward-deployed engineer. Rather than sitting on top of a company’s software, Lily embeds into systems like SAP, NetSuite, Epicor, and Salesforce and builds autonomous workflow agents for tasks such as pricing, logistics, and technician diagnostics, going live in days instead of the quarters a custom integration usually takes. InstaLILY says revenue grew fivefold over the past year, with named customers including SRS Distribution, Parts Town, and United Rentals.
What it means for operators
“Forward-deployed engineer” borrows a Palantir-style label for embedding a technical team directly with the customer, except here the embedded worker is software. That is a sharper pitch than most agent startups make, and the fivefold revenue growth suggests real budget is following it. It also raises the same question as Hang Ten’s agentic code-generation bet: once an outside agent has write access deep inside your ERP or CRM, you need the same access controls and kill switch you would want for any AI agent with production credentials. Ask what Lily can touch and how fast you can pull that access before you let it near a system of record.