Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

[IT168 Information] on July 13, North American time, the global RPA industry leader UiPath announced that he had obtained an E round of financing of US $225 million, making the total financing amount of UiPath more than US $1.2 billion and a valuation of US $10.2 billion. It became the first company in the RPA industry with a valuation of more than US $10 billion, and it was also the highest valued RPA company in the world.

It is reported that this round of financing is led by Alkeon Capital Management, with the participation of top global investment companies such as Tiger Global Management Fund, Tencent Investment Fund, Sequoia Capital, Wellington Asset Management (the fifth largest investment company in the world), Coteau Investment, Alkeon, IVP and so on. After this round of financing, UiPath will increase investment in research and development.

The English name of RPA is Robotic Process Automation, and its Chinese translation is robot process automation. RPA is not a new technology, it has appeared in the 1990s. The value of RPA lies in that it can simplify the process, simulate and execute the established business process through the interactive action of the software robot based on certain rules, automate the enterprise process in a simpler and easier-to-use way, and reduce the overall IT cost.

Specifically, the RPA robot mainly simulates human work in the form of simulation, screencap and script, so as to automate those rule-based and repetitive business processes, saving time and improving work efficiency for the organization. According to a survey by McKinsey, more than 70% of the companies in the Fortune 500 use RPA.

RPA is favored by enterprises because of the soaring labor costs and the complexity of business processes caused by the rapid development of business. Since the epidemic, the demand of enterprises for automatic office is more urgent. Due to the untimely communication between home and office, the work efficiency is greatly reduced. Therefore, many organizations have begun to apply RPA in various fields. For example, the British National Health Bureau automatically analyzes and publishes data through RPA in response to novel coronavirus: during the epidemic, the British National Health Bureau decided to conduct a detailed analysis of a large amount of personal data, including gender, whereabouts, health information, recent medical visits, health consultation and other data, in order to find potential COVID-19 patients. It is impossible to deal with such a large amount of data manually.

Since 2018, the rapid warming of the RPA market has been favored by many world technology giants, such as Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, Oracle and so on. In 2018, three head players UiPath, Anywhere Automation and BluePrism won more than $1 billion in venture capital.

The development of UiPath can be described as all the way, was founded in 2005 Romania, then known as Desk Over, mainly for Microsoft, IBM and other large companies to do automated warehouse outsourcing projects, officially renamed to UiPath in 2015. After round B financing in March 2018, it was valued at more than $1 billion and became a tech unicorn. In May 2019, UiPath received $568 million in financing from D-round, with a post-investment valuation of $7 billion.

In 2019, RPA became popular in China and attracted the attention of all parties. Under the epidemic, the cold winter of capital is even more cold, and the domestic RPA track is not so cold. Since February, domestic RPA companies have completed a number of major financing, such as Laiyi Technology obtaining $42 million in round C financing, Cloud expansion Technology obtaining $30 million in round B financing, and Dagan data obtaining B+ round financing of RMB 270 million, and so on.

Now UiPath has obtained new financing again, and its post-investment valuation has reached 10.2 billion US dollars, which also makes the RPA market get more attention and expectations. At present, UiPath's recurrent revenue has increased from $100m to $400m, and CAGR (compound annual growth rate) has exceeded 300% in just three years, which is one of the reasons for the huge investment this time.

RPA is a typical light product and heavy service, and RPA+AI is also considered to be the future development direction. Under the epidemic, the digitization process is accelerating, and RPA, represented by UiPath, will also meet new opportunities and challenges.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.