(Image source: UiPath) On April 21, local time, UiPath, an American AI machine processing automation technology developer and enterprise-level RPA software giant, successfully landed on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock code “PATH”. UiPath’s opening stock price was 65.50 US dollars per share, which was an increase of about 17% from the issue price of 56 US dollars per share. It broke through 70.40 US dollars in midday, and the intraday increase expanded to nearly 26%. As of press time, UiPath’s closing price on the first day was US$69 per share, an increase of more than 23%, and its market value reached US$35.8 billion. Prior to this, UiPath had publicly sold 23.9 million shares for US$56, raising nearly US$1.34 billion. If the underwriters use the green shoe mechanism to choose over-allotment, UiPath will create the third largest software IPO in the history of US stocks based on the total amount of listed financing, second only to Snowflake in September last year and Qualtrics in January this year. At the same time, this is another enterprise-level software unicorn entering the capital market following the successful listing of such giants as Zoom and Snowflake. Moreover, UiPath is the first RPA software platform to land on the US stock market with the highest market value. UiPath is headquartered in New York, USA, mainly for corporate customers to help them build and optimize their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform. To put it simply, the role of RPA is to maximize the use of it to replace or assist humans in completing repetitive tasks and tasks in digital devices such as computers, so as to achieve the goal of reducing costs and increasing efficiency and improving work efficiency. For example, in the invoice reimbursement scenario, a large number of invoices are normally sorted by human means, and then summarized into a form and submitted to the enterprise OA system, while the RPA platform directly makes a product interface for invoice collection and reimbursement requests. Employees only It needs to be uploaded by sorting folders, clicking on the relevant button, the platform will wake up the so-called “AI robot” behind it, and process the reimbursement process in an automated manner, simplifying the entire reimbursement process by machine. Main functions and features of RPA (Source: iResearch) In fact, the current RPA market is still relatively small compared to cloud computing, semiconductors and other race tracks. As of the end of 2020, the global RPA market is only about 17 billion US dollars, and it is expected to increase to 30 billion US dollars by the end of 2024. However, the importance of the RPA platform is that if a manufacturing company with a revenue of 20 billion U.S. dollars and 50,000 employees, 20% of its work flow can be completed with RPA automation, it can bring more than 3,000 to it every year. Ten thousand dollars in profit. Zhu Xiaohu, managing director of Jinshajiang Venture Capital Fund, pointed out at last year’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference that the RPA software and service market is a “unmanned economy” of tens of billions of dollars, with huge potential for commercial value. “UiPath’s successful listing means that the capital market can pay attention to and recognize more RPA companies, and it can also play an educational role for customers in various industries.” Liu Chungang, founder and CEO of Yunkuo Technology, said in an exclusive interview with Titanium Media App, Although all walks of life have very strong application requirements for RPA, domestic RPA companies are still in the niche circle of the corporate service track, and have not really “out of the circle.” If UiPath continues to improve in the capital market, it will help more people understand RPA track technology and enterprises. Founded in 2017, Yunkuo Technology is a domestic enterprise-level intelligent RPA platform provider headquartered in Shanghai. In March of this year, Yunkuo Technology completed the B+ round of financing invested by Flaming Capital. Prior to this, the company has received a total of more than 45 million U.S. dollars in investment from well-known investment institutions such as Sequoia Capital China Fund, Jinshajiang Venture Capital, B Trend Capital, and Shenzhen Venture Capital. Zhou Tianen, an analyst at Head Leopard Research Institute, told Titanium Media App that the listing of UiPath has positive significance for the industry. “Because of its high growth and high gross profit, it is extremely good among SaaS companies. UiPath proved that the revenue model based on licensing revenue, operation and maintenance and technical support is feasible and the business model has high potential; and, due to the penetration rate of RPA in China Low, UiPath’s good revenue growth model can prove that China’s RPA market space needs to be tapped, and domestic RPA companies may take the opportunity to accelerate their deployment.” Zhou Tianen said. High growth + high gross profit + high retention rate behind RPA star stocks The story of UIPath development began in 2005. Self-taught programmer Daniel Dines (Daniel Dines) chose to leave after working in the SQL server agent development department of Microsoft Corporation in Seattle for 5 years. He established the predecessor of UIPath DeskOver in Romania through the formation of a 10-person technical team. It mainly provides technical outsourcing consulting services for companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Google, and also develops some automation products. In 2013, the Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) company hopes that DeskOver can provide its customers with software for automated tasks. Although Deans’ company does not focus on RPA technology, he sees business opportunities. Soon, DeskOver attracted the attention of Yahoo. In 2015, it received financing to develop an enterprise-level RPA platform, officially renamed “UiPath”, and fully transformed into RPA technology research and development. Today, UiPath has become a leader in the RPA field. According to the “2019 RPA Magic Quadrant Research Report” released by Gartner, the top 5 global RPA tracks are UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, NICE and Pegasystems. Compared with other similar companies, the secret of UiPath’s success lies in its unique product service capabilities. UiPath relies on its three intelligent automation platforms, from discovery, construction, management, operation, participation in a total of five major eighteen products, Realize to provide customers with end-to-end automated service solutions . UiPath’s business model is to help customers deploy more unattended, manned, testing and AI robots through the platform to save time, improve efficiency and create business value. According to the prospectus, UiPath’s revenues for fiscal year 2019, fiscal year 2020, and fiscal year 2021 as of January 31 were US$148 million, US$336 million, and US$608 million, respectively; gross profit was US$100 million, US$276 million, 540 million U.S. dollars; operating losses were 257 million U.S. dollars, 517 million U.S. dollars, and 110 million U.S. dollars; net losses were 262 million U.S. dollars, 520 million U.S. dollars, and 92.39 million U.S. dollars. The main reason for UiPath’s loss is that UiPath’s sales expenses and R&D expenses are relatively high. In the fiscal year 2019, fiscal year 2020, and fiscal year 2021 ending on January 31, UiPath sales and marketing expenses reached 190 million U.S. dollars, 483 million U.S. dollars, and 380 million U.S. dollars; R&D expenditures were 66.92 million U.S. dollars, 131 million U.S. dollars, 101 million US dollars. Specific profit model , UiPath generates revenue by providing an automated platform to collect subscription fees from customers. Usually start from a single project and gradually expand to the department and the company as a whole, thereby further improving the company’s degree of automation and work efficiency. At present, the company’s revenue sources are divided into two parts: licenses and maintenance and support, accounting for approximately 6:4. Customer retention rate is as high as 96%. The prospectus shows that in the fiscal year 2019, fiscal year 2020, and fiscal year 2021 as of January 31, UiPath authorized revenue was 94.91 million U.S. dollars, 200 million U.S. dollars, and 346 million U.S. dollars; maintenance support business income was 47.287 million U.S. dollars, 120 million U.S. dollars and 232 million U.S. dollars. Currently, UiPath has nearly 8,000 customers. Among the famous Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America, Toyota Motor, General Electric and Adobe, 61% are UiPath customers, and 80% of the Fortune 10 companies are customers. UiPath’s customer information (Source: IPO roadshow PPT) Another thing worth noting is that In the past eight quarters, UiPath’s quarterly revenue growth rate has stabilized at around 80% year-on-year, while gross profit margin has continued to rise, reaching a staggering 90%. Moreover, as the company’s cost control capabilities are constantly improving, in the fiscal year ending January 31, 2021, UiPath has twice achieved profitability. In general, UiPath leverages its leading position in the RPA field, In 5 years, revenue has grown from US$1 million in revenue to US$600 million, and it has achieved high gross profit and high retention rate. It is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in history. Strong revenue capabilities and improved profitability have pushed UiPath’s valuation upward. The company’s valuation after its F round (Pre-IPO round) financing in February this year has reached 35 billion U.S. dollars. UiPath financing history (Source: TechCrunch) According to data from CrunchBase, before the IPO, UiPath had raised a total of US$2 billion through 27 investors and 8 rounds of financing. Among them, the A round and B round were led by Accel Capital and Google’s CapitalG. Star institutional investors such as Tencent Investment and Sequoia Capital participated in the subsequent rounds. Will low-code technology impact the RPA market? Compared with China’s RPA market with a scale of less than 1 billion, the low-code application development technology (LCAP) is more favored by the outside world, and giants such as Ali and Tencent are even hotter. On January 14, 2021, Alibaba’s DingTalk officially released version 6.0, and launched DingDingYida and other low-code development tools. Enterprise application development can be deployed through a “drag and drop” method. The “low-code development” model based on the integration of cloud nails allows users who do not understand the code to quickly develop new applications. The so-called low-code development refers to a development model in which applications can be quickly generated without coding (0 code) or with a small amount of code. According to the “2021 China Low-Code/No-Code Market Research Report” released by the Haibi Research Institute in January this year, the overall market size of China’s low-code application development technology has reached 1.9 billion, with a compound growth rate of 49.5% in the next five years. This means that by 2025, the scale of the low-code market is expected to exceed 6 billion yuan. In an interview with VentureBeat, the CEO of process technology provider Celonis, Alexander Rinke bluntly stated that the combination of process technology and low-code automation can replace automation technologies such as RPA+AI and is even more effective than traditional RPA. And extensible. He believes that the low-code technology movement is constantly impacting the development of the global RPA market. In this regard, Liu Chungang does not agree with this statement. He pointed out that RPA is an application branch area under AI technology, and low-code is a graphical programming technology. RPA and low-code technology complement each other, and the two technologies are not mutually replaceable. “Although there are some common requirements, I think low-code and RPA solve different problems. RPA solves the problem of repetitive operations in existing software systems, while low-code solves the development cost and development cost of lightweight applications. The issue of efficiency. I believe that the combination of RPA and low-code technologies can provide customers with better solutions and solve practical problems more efficiently.” Liu Chungang said to the Titanium Media App. It is reported that Yunkuo Technology has released a new low-code product Encoo ViCode based on the Encoo RPA platform, which can be seamlessly integrated with Yunku RPA products. With the non-intrusive and flexible configuration characteristics of RPA, it can build multiple systems and multiple systems. Complete closed-loop application of the data source, and complete the company’s complete product line layout in RPA+LCAP. (Image source: Yunkuo Technology) Zhou Tianen believes that from an application perspective, low-code technology has added more room for imagination to the RPA market. In the past, RPA is more suitable for large enterprises, and the cost of RPA for small and medium enterprises is relatively high. The low-code technology can reduce the user’s difficulty. “First, designing the RPA process based on graphical operations can reduce the amount of code writing, enhance the application experience of non-IT technicians, and increase the speed of RPA development; second, low code helps to quickly design workflows and accelerate business application delivery. Reduce the development threshold and the initial cost of training and deployment. RPA+ low-code platform can be applied to smaller-scale enterprises than before, so the overall market space of RPA increases.” Zhou Tianen told Titan Media App that low-code is the development trend of RPA And the potential business model, there will be more RPA vendors launching low-code or no-code editors in the future. Zhou Tianen emphasized that there is no contradiction between low-code and RPA, and their respective characteristics are different. RPA is applied to the operation interface of different systems to help employees cope with repetitive and regular tasks; low-code development platforms help companies to reduce the amount of code. Reduce development costs and flexibly update and iterate. Why hasn’t the Chinese version of UiPath been born yet? The epidemic has accelerated the process of unmanned office and digital construction, and has allowed RPA to continue to “out of the circle”. According to Forrester’s enterprise survey, at the end of 2019, RPA technology ranked the lowest among all enterprise automation system deployments; and by 2020, the ranking of RPA technology has risen to the first place. During our visit, we found that no matter whether it is Cloud Expansion Technology, the RPA+AI service provider Laiye Technology that announced financing within a few hours before UiPath’s listing, or Hongji Cyclone, Daguan Data, etc., no one dares to claim that they are ” Chinese version of UiPath”. Regardless of company size or global market share, Chinese local RPA companies are far from UiPath and Blue Prism. China RPA Industry Chain (Source: Head Leopard Research Institute) Zhou Tianen told the Titanium Media App that there are three main reasons for this: 1. RPA is an industry born according to the needs of enterprise applications. The digital transformation of the business process of large Chinese enterprises is later than that of the United States, and the demand for RPA is less. Therefore, the establishment of enterprises such as Cloud Expansion and Laiye is later than UiPath, and it is normal that the scale is smaller than that of international leading enterprises; 2. The penetration rate of China’s RPA market is still lower than that of countries and regions with high labor costs such as the United States and Europe, and the business volume of local RPA companies will be less and the pace will be slow; 3. It is difficult for local RPA suppliers to touch the market of competing multinational companies, whose RPA needs are all occupied by UiPath. For Chinese RPA suppliers, it is more difficult to compete with UiPath. However, Zhou Tianen also emphasized that the RPA needs of many local companies in China have yet to be developed. If the cloud expands and wins the market competition in this field, the size of the enterprise will be very considerable, and conservative estimates will very likely reach the scale of UiPath. In an exclusive interview with Titanium Media App, Liu Chungang said that the relative cheapness of labor costs and the adequacy of labor have led Chinese companies to use automated software systems to improve operational efficiency and accelerate digital transformation. The urgency of the demand is relatively higher than that of foreign companies. low. “Nowadays, with the country’s advocacy for accelerating the digital development of various industries and the growing demand for more agile tools for companies themselves to face internal and external challenges, corporate executives have begun to pay attention to RPA technology. This is a very critical signal for change.” Liu Chungang It is believed that good companies never lack investment, and Chinese RPA companies will continue to grow rapidly. The fact is that the focus of enterprises has begun to shift from integrating external resource elements to tapping internal management. Actively looking for tools to improve internal management efficiency is a key element for enterprises to optimize processes and improve labor productivity. Therefore, RPA software is on the eve of a full-blown explosion. Liu Chungang emphasized that as Chinese companies continue to increase their demand for digitalization, intelligence, and informatization, a giant like UiPath will surely appear on the RPA track in China in the future. This is what he believes. However, he did not mention who will eventually become the Chinese version of UiPath. (This article first published Titanium Media App, author｜Lin Zhijia, editor｜Gai Hongda)
You must log in to post a comment.