When TechCrunch lined UIPath’s Series A in 2017, it was a small startup out of Romania working in a bit identified space of enterprise software program referred to as robotic course of automation (RPA).
Then the corporate took off with more and more massive multibillion greenback valuations. It progressed by its funding rounds, culminating with a $750 million round on an eye-popping $35 billion valuation final month.
This morning, the corporate took the following step on its rapid-fire evolutionary path when it filed its S-1 to go public. To illustrate simply how briskly the corporate’s rise has been, check out its funding historical past:
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RPA is significantly better understood lately with bigger enterprise software program firms like SAP, Microsoft, IBM and ServiceNow getting concerned. With RPA, firms can automate a secular course of like processing an insurance coverage declare, transferring work mechanically, whereas bringing in people solely when completely obligatory. For instance, as a substitute of getting an individual enter a quantity in a spreadsheet from an e-mail, that may occur mechanically.
In June 2019, Gartner reported that RPA was the fastest-growing area in enterprise software program, rising at over 60% per yr, and attracting buyers and bigger enterprise software program distributors to the house. While RPA’s development has slowed because it matures, a September 2020 Gartner report discovered it increasing at a extra modest 19.5% with complete income anticipated to attain $2 billion in 2021. Gartner discovered that stand-alone RPA distributors UIPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere are the market leaders.
Although the market feels relatively small given the dimensions of the corporate’s valuation, it’s nonetheless a nascent house. In its S-1 filing this morning, the corporate painted a rosy image, projecting a $60 billion addressable market. While TAM estimates have a tendency to pattern massive, UIPath factors out that the quantity encompasses excess of pure RPA into what they name “Intelligent Process Automation.” That may embody not solely RPA, but in addition course of discovery, workflow, no-code improvement and different types of automation.
Indeed, as we wrote earlier in the present day on the soaring process automation market, the corporate might be going to want to develop into these different areas to actually develop, particularly now that it’s competing with a lot larger firms for enterprise automation {dollars}.
While UIPath is within the midst of its quiet interval, it got here up for air this week to announce that it had bought Cloud Elements, an organization that offers it entry to API integration, an vital part of automation within the enterprise. Daniel Dines, the corporate co-founder and CEO mentioned the acquisition was about constructing a bigger platform of automation instruments.
“The acquisition of Cloud Elements is just one example of how we are building a flexible and scalable enterprise-ready platform that helps customers become fully automated enterprises,” he mentioned in an announcement.
While there’s plenty of CEO communicate in that assertion, there’s additionally a component of reality in that the corporate is wanting on the bigger automation story. It can use among the money from its prodigious fundraising to start increasing on its authentic imaginative and prescient with smaller acquisitions that may fill in lacking items within the product highway map.
The firm will want to do this and extra to compete in a quickly transferring market, the place many distributors are preventing for various components of the enterprise. As it continues its journey to changing into a public firm, it’ll want to proceed discovering new methods to improve income by tapping into totally different components of the broader automation stack.
