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SoftBank joins the RPA craze, leads $300M round into Automation Anywhere
Automation Anywhere Inc., one of the biggest players in the red-hot robotic process automation market, today announced that it has snagged $300 million from SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund.
The investment values the software maker at $2.6 billion. It comes as an extension to the $250 million Series C round that Automation Anywhere raised in July, which gave it a $1.8 billion valuation.
The company is the latest to benefit from a recent surge in investor interest around RPA that just this week saw another major player, UiPath Inc., secure fresh capital of its own.
RPA software uses artificial intelligence to help enterprises automate the most repetitive and labor-intensive parts of employees’ work. The exact approach varies among solutions, but the basic concept is the same: RPA tools observe how a user completes a task in a business application and then use AI to replicate their workflow.
As Automation Anywhere Chief Executive Mihir Shukla (pictured) explained in a recent interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE studio, “it can read a computer screen, it can apply a set of rules and often it can make basic cognitive decisions, as well. So with this combination, it can operate any application like people can and run things in an autonomous way.”
The fact that Automation Anywhere’s platform and other RPA solutions can interact with an application visually avoids the need to make any modifications to the target system. As a result, RPA software is much easier to deploy at scale than traditional alternatives.
Automation Anywhere has set its platform apart from competing solutions with an expansive set of value-added features. The software enables companies to build custom AI bots optimized for their workloads, centrally manage their deployment and analyze performance. Organizations can also access ready-made bots for popular business applications through a marketplace added in March.
Automation Anywhere’s value proposition has won over more than 1,400 enterprises to date. Notable users include General Motors Co. and Mastercard Inc. and Google LLC. For its part, rival UiPath claims more than 3,000 customers, a gap that Automation Anywhere will now be better equipped to tackle thanks to today’s funding.
The company has raised a total of $550 million from investors to date. Besides SoftBank, Automation Anywhere is backed by New Enterprise Associates, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, General Atlantic and World Innovation Lab.
Photo: SiliconANGLE
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