The market for RPA — Robotic Process Automation — is getting a hat trick of news this week: Automation Anywhere has today announced that it has raised $300 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund. This funding, which values Automation Anywhere at $2.6 billion post-money, is an extension to the Series A the company announced earlier this year, which was at a $1.8 billion valuation. It brings the total size of the round to $550 million.
The news comes just a day after one of the startup’s bigger competitors, UiPath, announced a $265 million raise at a $3 billion valuation; and a week after Kofax, another competitor, announced it would be acquiring a division of Nuance for $400 million to beef up its business.
It’s also yet one more example of a one-two punch in funding. It was only in July that Automation Anywhere announced its $250 million in funding.
This latest round adds some significant investors to the company’s cap table, specifically from the SoftBank Vision Fund. The fund has been under fire for the last few weeks because of the fact that a large swathe of its backing comes from Saudi money, and Saudi Arabia has been in the spotlight over its role in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. By extension, there have been questions raised over taking money from the Vision Fund with so many questions still in the air over that affair.
While it feels like artificial intelligence is something that you see referenced at every turn these days in the tech world, RPA is an interesting area because it’s one of the more tangible applications of it, across a wide set of businesses.
In short, it’s a set of software-based “robots” that help companies automate mundane and repetitive tasks that would otherwise be done by human workers, employing AI-based technology in areas like computer vision and machine learning to get the work done.
Competition among companies to grab pole position in the space is fierce. Automation Anywhere has 1,400 organizations as customers, it says. By comparison, UiPath has 2,100 and claims an annual revenue run rate at the moment of $150 million.
In light of that, the company will be using the funding to build out its business specifically ahead of rivals.
“With this additional capital, we are in a position to do far more than any other provider,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO and Co-Founder at Automation Anywhere, in a statement. “We will not only continue to deliver the most advanced RPA to the market, but we will help bring AI to millions. Like the introduction of the PC, we see a world where every office employee will work alongside digital workers, amplifying human contributions. Today, employees must know how to use a PC and very soon employees will have to know how to build a bot.”
Automation Anywhere claims that its Bot Store is the industry’s largest marketplace for bot applications, designed both by itself and partners, to execute different business processes, with 65,000 users since launching in March 2018.