It’s a big day for Apttus Corp. and its cloud-based billing automation.

The company, which helps organizations prepare invoices and contracts, today raised a hefty $88 million investment from a group of backers led by UAE-based fund GII. The funding brings its valuation to $1.3 billion, making it a new unicorn.

Apttus will now shift gears and start laying the groundwork for the public offering that it’s planning to launch in the first half of next year. One of the company’s main priorities is to become profitable, an objective likely influenced by the recent skepticism towards loss-making tech firms on Wall Street.

Investors’ attitudes toward companies going public has improved considerably in the past few months thanks to the successful IPOs of Twilio Inc. and Talend Inc., but a positive balance sheet can still go a long way toward helping a company meet its funding goal.

Apttus was profitable for several years before taking on its first round of funding in late 2013. And Chief Executive Kirk Krappe told Forbes that annual sales recently passed the $150 million mark on a 60 percent annual growth rate. The vendor says it has more than 500 enterprise customers, including over a fifth of the organizations on the Fortune 500 list.

To maintain its momentum, Apptus plans to invest most of the funds from today’s round into product development. The main focus of its efforts will be an artificial intelligence called Max (above) that made its debut this morning in conjunction with the funding announcement.

It’s integrated directly into the company’s cloud services and promises to help automate many of the time-consuming tasks involved in creating an invoice, including much of the data entry work. Financial professionals can control the bot’s behavior using natural-language voice commands.

Image via Pixabay