UiPath, an NYC startup that aims to make work easier with robotic process automation (RPA), announced Monday it closed on a Series E funding round, raising $225 million at a post-money valuation of more than $10 billion. This, plus the similarly large investments the company received in 2019 and 2018, brings its total funding raised to a whopping $1.2 billion.
Founded in 2005, UiPath aims to apply RPA to a variety of industries, taking over rote tasks like invoice or claims processing so employees can focus on the more important aspects of their jobs. This, according to the company, has become increasingly important in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to be so as employers look to automation as a way to keep their workers safer and more productive.
“COVID-19 has heightened the critical need of automation to address challenges and create value in days and weeks, not months and years. We are committed to working harder to help our customers evolve, transform and succeed fast in the new normal,” CEO and co-founder Daniel Dines said in a statement. “This funding allows us to accelerate our platform ambitions to meet mounting customer demands and scale the tremendous opportunity to bring automation to one billion citizen developers — resulting in every business finally becoming a software business.”
Demand for UiPath has certainly been growing. According to VentureBeat, the company went from 100 customers in 2017 to more than 5,000 last year, automating tasks for some of the largest global brands, including Google, NASA and McDonald’s. CFO Ashim Gupta also told Crunchbase News that the company’s annual recurring revenue went from $200 million last year to more than $400 million this year, affirming that “hyperautomation is one of the fastest growing spaces.”
A representative from UiPath told Built In via email that this most recent funding round is not needed to fund the company’s current business operations. Instead, it will be used to continue its “A Robot for Every Person” initiative, accelerate its cloud-based delivery, deepen its investments in AI-powered innovation and continue investing in “complementary technologies” to expand its own platform. The company is also growing its team, “doubling down” on filling R&D and engineering roles.
