UiPath’s Forward III: How New Acquisitions Shape the Company’s Future

Daniel Dines, co-founder and CEO, UiPath, speaking at FORWARD III in Las Vegas earlier this week.

Over the past few years, UiPath has been on a trajectory of rapid growth. In 24 months, it’s annual recurring revenue went from $8 million to over $200 million, and it now employees about 2,500 people. The major RPA player isn’t showing any signs of slowing down either, announcing two major acquisitions — ProcessGold and StepShot — at its flagship event, FORWARD III, in Las Vegas earlier this week.

The acquisitions represent the next stage of UiPath maturation in the RPA market. Following its acquisition of ProcessGold, a process mining vendor, UiPath has become the first vendor of scale to bring together both process mining and RPA.

“This is a game-changer for UiPath that highlights our evolution as a company, as we look to further enable our customers in their automation journey by helping them better understand their processes, identify opportunities for automation, and then measure the impact of those automations,” said Daniel Dines, UiPath co-founder and CEO.

UiPath’s acquisition of StepShot, a provider of process documentation software, will accelerate customers’ automation journeys by enabling them to quickly and easily record, document, and share processes, as well as automate key steps in robot creation.

UiPath is the first among leading RPA vendors to offer such capabilities built directly into its platform; a key differentiator as enterprises seek to successfully implement and expand their RPA deployments for a broad spectrum of well-defined and undefined processes.

“We work closely with customers to build automation strategies that transform their business. Yet there is still huge untapped value in making the documentation process into an easier, more effective solution,” said Dines. “The acquisition of StepShot immediately helps us solve that for our customers.”

UiPath Explorer

Building on both of these acquisitions, UiPath has introduced the UiPath Explorer product family. This is all about simplifying process understanding enterprise-wide, the UiPath Explorer family makes it easy it to identify, document, analyse and prioritise processes, with a unique ability to understand both front-line and back-end operations, through scientific and visual analysis.

“Together with the StepShot acquisition and our organic work in Process Understanding, we can now help our customers have a complete view of their processes, including everything from front-end granular user actions to the back-end, higher-level transactional steps,” said PD Singh, vice president of AI at UiPath.

IA’s take

It will be interesting to look at how these new acquisitions and the introduction of UiPath Explorer impact customers.

While RPA has proven itself to be a powerful technology — helping enterprises cut costs and liberate staff from mundane processes — there’s no getting around the issues this area of tech has with scalability. According to a survey by HFS Research, only 13% of RPA adopters are currently scaled up and industrialised. While the issue of scaling RPA is multi-faceted, UiPath is addressing one of the biggest problems: assessing processes before automating them. Too often, enterprises are leading with a solution before identifying the problem. After an RPA deployment, many enterprises are just left with a different form of a worker doing the same job. IA believes RPA should be seen as an opportunity to drive dramatic process improvement first.

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