By interacting with applications just as a human would, software robots can open email attachments, complete e-forms, record and re-key data, and perform other tasks that mimic human action.
—Kaushik Iyengar, director of Digital Transformation and Optimization at AT&T1
Back in 2005, Daniel Dines and Marius Tirca founded UiPath, which was located in Bucharest, Romania. The company focused mostly on providing integration services for applications from Google, Microsoft, and IBM. But it was a struggle as the company relied mostly on custom work for clients.
By 2013, UiPath was close to being shut down. But the founders did not give up as they saw this as an opportunity to rethink the business and find a new opportunity.2 To this end, they started to build a platform for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The category, which had been around since 2000, was about automating routine and mundane tasks within a company.
Yet RPA was actually a backwater area in the tech world—as seen with the slow growth rates. However, Dines and Tirca were convinced that they could transform the industry. One of the key reasons: the rise of AI and the cloud.
The new strategy was spot-on, and growth took off. Dines and Tirca also were aggressive with seeking funding, innovating its RPA platform, and expanding into global markets.
By 2018, UiPath was considered the fastest-growing enterprise software company—ever. The annual recurring revenue soared from $1 million to $100 million, with over 1,800 customers.3 The company had the most widely used RPA system in the world.
UiPath attracted a total of $448 million in venture capital from marque firms like CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, and Accel. The valuation was at $3 billion.
In light of all this, more RPA startups snagged significant funding as well. Then again, the market is forecasted to see tremendous growth. Grand View Research predicts that spending will hit $3.97 billion in the United States by 2025.4
Interestingly enough, Forrester had this to say about the RPA trend:
- Today’s most successful companies generally operate with fewer employees than those of the past. Consider that Kodak at its peak in 1973 employed 120,000, but when Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, the photo-sharing site employed only 13 workers. In 2019, we predict that one in 10 startups—operating in a more agile, lean, and scalable fashion— will look at the world through the lens of tasks, not jobs, and will build business models around automation-first principles.5
RPA is yet another area that has been supercharged with AI. If anything, it could be the gateway for many companies because the implementation usually does not take long or require heavy costs.
In this chapter, we’ll take a look at RPA and see how it could be a critical driver for many companies.
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