The stakes in the ultra-competitive workflow automation business continue to rise.

Tray.io Inc., a London-based startup that provides a service for streamlining repetitive business tasks, has announced the completion of $5 million investment led by local fund Mosaic Ventures. The financing also saw the participation of True Ventures, which was the main contributor to the firm’s previous $2.2 million round in 2015. It’s the latest highlight of a recent surge in industry interest around integrating and automating cloud applications that has until now focused mainly on Tray.io’s better-established U.S. rivals.

IFTTT Inc., which was the first to introduce the trend into the consumer world, redesigned its service earlier this month to help developers add automation features to their services more easily. And Tibco Software Inc. released a homegrown integration engine a few week earlier that lets companies build workflows for managing their connected devices. Tray.io has positioned itself somewhere in the between by enabling workers to create custom connectors between business applications through a simplified interface that borrows a page from consumer software.

A demo on the startup’s sites shows how its service can be used to automatically detect, organize and react to important work emails based on the identity of sender. Morever, Tray.io says that its service also lends itself to department-specific tasks such as lead management. A salesperson, for instance, could employ the tool’s drag-and-drop workbench to create a connector that sends them a Slack notification when potential prospects sign up to their company’s website. And if time is a priority, they could set the service to alert a colleague in the event that they’re unavailable.

The service that perhaps comes closest to providing such customizability without requiring any coding is Microsoft Corp,’s Flow, which hit general availability a few weeks ago. Tech City News, a blog focusing on the London tech scene, reports that the startup will use the investment to develop more features and open a new headquarters in San Francisco.

Image courtesy of Tray.io