Photo Essay from UiPath Forward5 Conference

During his portion of the keynote at UiPath's Forward5 Conference held last week at the Venetian in Las Vegas, company Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Dines discussed how in seven years, he had gone from working out of an apartment in Bucharest, Romania, with almost no revenue, to being CEO of a software vendor with a greater than $1B annualized renewal run-rate. UiPath's reported fiscal 2022 revenue (for the year ended Jan. 31) was $892M, but no matter how you count it, it's an impressive story.

To date, UiPath has achieved the majority of its growth by establishing itself as the leader in the fast growing robotic process automation (RPA) space. Dines cited one analyst firm as crediting UiPath with a 31% RPA market share. But, as we have mentioned in our coverage of RPA, with a focus on how it is related to Capture, RPA's growth is slowing and the technology is becoming commoditized as it reaches a critical mass and more tech giants like Microsoft, IBM, ServiceNow, SAP buy their way into the space and make RPA a part of their enterprise offerings.

UiPath is not oblivious to this trend and recently slightly lowered its revenue guidance for fiscal 2022. This did not help its already suffering stock, which was trading at around a quarter of what it was a year ago, albeit still with a healthy market cap of close to $7B. To help rejuvenate its business and reach a goal of $5B in annual revenue, UiPath is attempting to expand from its RPA roots to become a leader in the nascent Enterprise Automation space.

As you can see from the chart above, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), basically what we have historically referred to as Capture, is right in the middle of UiPath's Enterprise Automation charter. UiPath launched its Document Understanding product in May 2020 and already has more than 1,100 customers using it, or more than 10% of its WW customer base. It's cited as one of the ISV's fastest growing products.

At Forward5, UiPath announced several upgrades to Document Understanding to be included in this month's 2022.10 release. This includes a doubling of the number of pre-trained document modules from 15 to 30, an expanded capability for incorporating business rules and a new machine learning driven classifier for splitting documents into logical parts.

I had the opportunity to talk with multiple UiPath partners and customers and the general consensus was the while Document Understanding didn't start out on par with more established Capture products, UiPath is rapidly improving the capabilities. The users and partners like the idea that it can be incorporated on the same platform with their overall automation initiatives. Invoices are still the majority of documents being processed but that is gradually diversifying and volumes are increasing, with some some customers holding multi-million page per year licenses.

UiPath also recently bought Re:infer, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) specialist with a current focus on mining customer communications. During a keynote session, Rushabh Shah, Director, Deutsche Bank, U.S., explained how Re:infer was being leveraged to mine internal mailboxes to figure out what Deutsche Bank's customers were really concerned about. There are plans to integrate Re:infer with Document Understanding for better unstructured document processing and also with UiPath's process mining technology to provide a "content in context" snapshop of processes, something ABBYY talked about after its acquisition of Timeline PI.

In conclusion, UiPath has big plans for the future, which include Capture/IDP. To help execute these plans, in May the company brought in former Google Cloud President and top SAP executive Rob Enslin as a co-CEO. Judging by the crowd of some 3,500 attendees at Forward5, his tenure is off to a good start.

And, as this overflow crowd standing outside the door of a presentation on Document Understanding illustrates, UiPath and its customers and partners are serious about the Capture market.