Robotic Process Automation: Big Market, Big Money

CUBE Conversation with Carl & Jeff

Carl Eschenbach of Sequoia Capital sat down with Jeff Frick last week in theCUBE's Palo Alto Studios. The topic was #automation and #RPA (Robotic Process Automation). The research we've done suggests that this market is a little over $1B in revenue today and will explode 10X to more than $10B by 2023. Carl just participated in the latest monster $225M round for UiPath, which has raised more than $400M to date and currently has a $3B valuation. 

UiPath may be the fastest growing software company in history - showing 100X revenue growth in a 2-year period - and it's on track to double this year and approach $200M in bookings. The company competes with Automation Anywhere - another hot company in the space - and Blue Prism, a public company with a $1.6B valuation as of 10/1/18. 

RPA (software robots essentially) are growing rapidly within enterprises that want to automate mundane tasks to lower costs and shift human capital toward more strategic initiatives. All industries are hopping on the trend and it's especially pronounced in financial services for back office tasks due to its obvious ROI and fast time to breakeven. 

Last week we heard a ton of RPA talk from Infor CEO Charles Phillips at the annual Inforum event in DC. Increasingly AI is being infused into RPA both internally from the platform providers and increasingly through APIs that can ingest external machine intelligence. This combination of internal and external innovation will have a multiplicative effect on business value. That's one reason the SIs are getting involved-- They love to surround large markets with bottom line business impacts. 

Earlier this year, theCUBE covered the Automation Anywhere Imagine event and this week is broadcasting from UiPath Forward in Miami. Lots happening in this area with many practical examples. 

Thanks to Carl for reconnecting with theCUBE team.