by Janus Boye
Last week fast growing technology firm UiPath had secured another $225 million investment. UiPath is used by several of our members in the automation & robotics peer groups. Many of which have not forgotten that it’s actually less than a year ago, that UiPath was bleeding cash and had a huge layoff wave.
While the investment clearly is exciting to some, it’s also a big gamble that increases expectations. What does it really mean for customers?
A stronger UiPath in the short term?
According to the press release:
UiPath will use this funding to deepen its investment in research and development
The investment certainly validates the recent assessment in The Forrester Wave™: Robotic Process Automation, Q4 2019:
“UiPath sits in the cockpit of the RPA rocket ship. UiPath’s financial backing, and savvy development and marketing, make it hard to bet against.”
Forrester named UiPath a leader alongside Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and EdgeVerve.
To be honest, additional investment in R&D is fine and good as it will improve the product down the road, but for existing customers, nothing much changes in the short term.
What happens to UiPath later?
The illustration used by Alan Pelz-Sharpe in his analysis of the recent UiPath news
Industry analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe wrote a worthwhile post covering the investment, where he drew parallels to previous UK software darling Autonomy.
To be fair, he did only single out UiPath, but fittingly to illustrate the post, he used an overinflated balloon.
To quote from the piece titled Unicons & Fairy Tales:
“...spectacular multiples make for great headlines, but beyond the early-stage startup with immense but untapped potential, they don’t make sense”
Momentum is good, but now the pressure is higher than ever for UiPath to deliver. When it comes to delivering, the investors will look at revenue growth more so than the net promoter score of existing customers.
With this valuation an IPO can’t be far away. Back in February, Bloomberg ran an article on this: A $7 Billion Robot to Automate Boring Tasks Eyes an IPO.
As is usual with software vendors going through hypergrowth, as a customer you’ll need to speak louder than in the past to get the attention. The best practice is to ramp up your own automation skills and that’s true now for UiPath customers more than ever.
Comparing UiPath to other recent and notable investments
For some perspective, here’s a few other sizable investment rounds:
Celonis raised $290 million for AI-powered process mining at $2.5 billion valuation (November 2019)
Berlin-based Contentful raised $80 million giving it a valuation that is “rapidly approaching $1 billion”. (June 2020)
These three are on smaller scale, but also with huge expectations:
Bryter raises $16M for a no-code platform for non-technical people to build enterprise automation apps (June 2020)
Gatsby Raises $28M Series B to Become How the Web is Built (May 2020)
Strapi closes $10 M series A Funding (May 2020)
Learn more about automation & robotics
You can join our community of peers working with automation & robotics. The regional groups in Denmark, Germany and Norway are without vendors and consultants. We regularly launch new groups, so get in touch if interested.
There’s also our frequent conference calls for members, where you can learn from case studies with implementing UiPath and other tools for AI, chatbots and robotics.
Finally, you can join us in Aarhus, Denmark in November for the Boye 20 conference, where the automation & robotics track features several case studies.