Robotic Process Automation (RPA) company, UiPath, on Monday announced the closure of its Series E investment round, raising $225 million at a post-money valuation of $10.2 billion led by Alkeon Capital Management.
Others participants include Accel, Coatue, Dragoneer, IVP, Madrona Venture Group, Sequoia Capital, Tencent, Tiger Global, Wellington, and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.
At over $400 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), UiPath is one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies worldwide, it claims.
In India, sectors outside of new age businesses, banking and financial services haven’t turned wholeheartedly towards automation solutions yet. While the lockdown has clearly demonstrated how technologically enabled businesses have survived and thrived during the crisis, many businesses are still figuring out about where they want to start their automation journey in the new normal. Automation solution providers are also looking at the MSME market for a new set of customers seeking to recover from the uncertainties caused by the pandemic with technology.
“This funding allows us to accelerate our platform ambitions to meet mounting customer demands and scale the tremendous opportunity to bring automation to one billion citizen developers – resulting in every business finally becoming a software business,” said Daniel Dines, UiPath Co-Founder and CEO. “We will advance our market-leading platform and will continue to deepen our investments in AI-powered innovation and expanded cloud offerings”
Businesses are now using RPA to monitor their employees’ health, manage employee pass and access management in the post-lockdown world, and scheduling customer queues, pre-servicing orders in a world constrained by social distancing norms. As an example, EY India with UiPath developed an RPA solution for the municipal corporation of greater Mumbai to generate bulk e-passes for service aggregators supplying essential supplies and services to residents of Mumbai, relieving their manual team from investing tremendous efforts in redundant tasks.
“Automation, similar to cloud computing, has become a strategic imperative that is fundamentally changing the way organizations operate. UiPath’s leading-edge, mission critical product combines scalable software with an intuitive user interface enabling companies globally to accelerate their digital transformation efforts,” said Abhi Arun, General Partner at Alkeon.
On an immediate basis, businesses are likely to migrate to simpler solutions such as chatbots and backend processing automation solutions which are less capital intensive than large scale industrial automation. But in the long run, experts feel, more critical human functions are likely to go the machines.
