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Significant news this week in the Intelligent Automation industry revealed that UK-based Blue Prism - in many ways the "founder" of Robotic Process Automation, if not of the intelligent automation industry - is a target for American Private Equity investment.
This news should probably not be a surprise: Blue Prism went public in March 2016 with a market capitalization of ~$70M and closed on Friday at ~$1.1Bn. Compare that to UIPath, which went public in April of this year and currently has a market cap of ~32Bn. After raising such a large amount of funds to invest in the future of its product set, UIPath may put itself in a good position to continue on its path toward market leadership, at least as far as Gartner is indicating.
For companies that have already invested in Blue Prism as their core RPA platform, this is almost certainly good news if it happens. Hopefully, this will allow Blue Prism to invest in the technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to continue to make workforce automation even more intelligent. Also, based on the Private Equity market overall, we may see investments in companies complementary to Blue Prism, leading to acceleration into closely adjacent markets.
We will watch this news closely to see what other major investments are happening in and around this space.
