Due to the impact of COVID-19, businesses are realizing the importance of building a robust digital workforce, and according to a WSJ article, the number of companies using automated technologies such as RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, is expected to double over the next two years. Blue Prism is a market leader in RPA and its Digital Workforce platform is already trusted by Fortune 500 companies such as Google and IBM. The platform is easy to use with drag-and-drop AI functionality and has code-optional RPA for non-technical business professionals. The company has built a ‘Digital Exchange’ ecosystem that consists of a robust community of experts, researchers, and technology providers – to test, advance, share, and deploy automated innovation.
London TechWatch sat down with Executive Chairman and CEO Jason Kingdon to learn more about Blue Prism’s origin, impressive growth (CAGR of 103% over last 3 years), and recent funding round.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Blue Prism announced it has raised £100M from existing and new investors in a post-IPO equity round.
Investors in this round included a mix of new and existing investors from across the US and Europe.
Tell us about the product or service Blue Prism offers.
Blue Prism’s vision is to provide a Digital Workforce for Every Enterprise using robotic process automation (RPA). The company’s purpose is to unleash the collaborative potential of humans, operating in harmony with a Digital Workforce, so every enterprise can exceed their business goals and drive meaningful growth, with unmatched speed and agility. Fortune 500 and public-sector organizations, among customers across 70 commercial sectors, trust Blue Prism’s enterprise-grade connected-RPA platform, which has users in more than 170 countries. By strategically applying intelligent automation, these organizations are creating new opportunities and services, while unlocking massive efficiencies that return millions of hours of work back into their business. Available on-premises, in the cloud, hybrid, or as an integrated SaaS solution, Blue Prism’s Digital Workforce automates ever more complex, end-to-end processes that drive a true digital transformation, collaboratively, at scale and across the entire enterprise.
What inspired the start of Blue Prism?
The origins of RPA can be traced to 2001, after the founding of Blue Prism, when Blue Prism’s Alastair Bathgate and David Moss started exploring how to create automation technology that could address operational inefficiencies where human workers perform repetitive tasks that span enterprise-wide IT systems.
How is Blue Prism different?
Blue Prism’s platform is secure and scalable, with a publicly listed status providing an advantage for larger organizations looking to invest in automation. The company’s Digital Worker is a highly productive, self-organizing, multi-tasking, autonomous, smart resource, designed to use and access the same IT systems and mechanisms as humans, and perform tasks in the same way as humans – while also working with and learning from humans and other robots.
In 2019, Blue Prism introduced the ‘connected-RPA’ brand concept to highlight a vast difference between its architecture, versus emerging variations of RPA. This has been a key differentiator between Blue Prism and its competitors, providing users with a unique, people-first approach to RPA that unleashes the collaborative potential of humans and Digital Workers to transform the future of work. So has Blue Prism’s ‘Digital Exchange’ ecosystem, which was created in early 2019 to provide business leaders with easily accessible transformative technologies and a community of experts, researchers, and technology providers – to test, advance, share and deploy automated innovation. Connected-RPA is now being made more easily accessible and easy to deploy than ever – on-premise, in the cloud, or as an integrated solution in a hybrid cloud environment.
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What market are you targeting and how big is it?
Blue Prism is targeting the growing market for enterprise-grade intelligent automation solutions like RPA, which grew 63.1% in 2018, making it the fastest-growing enterprise software category. Gartner forecast the RPA market at a value of $1.3 billion in 2019, and we only expect to see this value increase in 2020. Despite the crowded nature of the growing RPA market, Blue Prism saw increased momentum over the past year – this was particularly true of our varied customer base, which grew by 73%, adding companies like Amazon, L’Oreal and the U.S. Department of Justice to our roster while maintaining a 99.3% gross retention rate.
Who do you consider to be your primary competitors?
Blue Prism is a market leader in the RPA industry alongside companies like UiPath and Automation Anywhere, although our competitors have taken a different approach to addressing customer needs. Blue Prism’s focus on innovation allows us to stay ahead of the game by offering the latest in automation benefits for customers and partners as they scale their Digital Workforces to create a powerful, intelligent ecosystem that enables real digital transformation.
What’s your business model?
Blue Prism has continued to take an innovative approach to create solutions for customers and partners, helping knowledge workers automate intensive manual, white-collar tasks, focus on strategic work, scale the deployment of other emerging technologies and save time. One key example of this innovation was the creation of an increasingly essential forum for multi-directional collaboration and solution development: Blue Prism’s Digital Exchange (DX). In one year, the DX has secured 1,700 registered companies, accounting for thousands of downloads that enable convenient access to technologies from companies including Google, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others.
This momentum can be largely attributed to Blue Prism’s Technology Alliance Program, now over 50 partners, which allows participating companies to easily share their solutions by uploading them to the DX. By providing the ability to integrate IA capabilities and technologies from forward-thinking companies with Blue Prism’s RPA, the DX makes AI more accessible than ever.
Additionally, Blue Prism acquired Thoughtonomy in mid-2019, which joined the power of Blue Prism’s connected-RPA platform with Thoughtonomy’s SaaS capabilities, allowing customers to accelerate automation projects to drive improved productivity and customer experiences, without needing to set up a dedicated infrastructure to support their program.
What was the funding process like?
Very smooth. We try and maintain good relationships with the investor community regardless of any market activity, and this pays dividends when you are having important conversations like these.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
With social distancing and travel restrictions, we ran the entire process remotely, and the marketing roadshow was exclusively via Webex. Fortunately, we are set up well for this and as a growing, global business, we are experts in collaborating effectively with colleagues in different locations.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We are a market leader in one of the most exciting software product categories in at least recent history. It’s an exciting place for us to be and our investors share that excitement.
Our track record is very strong. Between 2016 – 2019 we grew revenue by a CAGR of 103%, well above the average for cloud software companies of 39% (BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index), and we have 1,800 enterprise-level customers who are partnering with us to scale up their business automation and enable adoption of AI technologies to revolutionize their business models.
We also have an incredibly strong underlying business model. We made investments over the past two years that have positioned us to take advantage of the huge market opportunity ahead, but unlike many tech companies, there is no real debate about how we translate these investments and the growth they generate into a very robust profitable business.
We are a market leader in one of the most exciting software product categories in at least recent history. It’s an exciting place for us to be and our investors share that excitement.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
In this new economic reality, automation has become a top business priority. In the next six months, Blue Prism will be focused on working to meet this demand by helping organizations stay resilient, responsive, and competitive through the deployment of a Digital Workforce. This funding positions the business as a strong partner to its large enterprise customer base, well placed to accelerate RPA adoption with organizations looking to maintain business continuity and alleviate the challenges of COVID-19 through intelligent automation.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
In addition to raising capital, we have focused inwardly on cost control. We have looked at the areas we absolutely need to preserve – such as product development – but then looked at areas where there are opportunities to make savings in this new environment. For example, our annual customer event will now be virtual – this is a large cost saving and an opportunity to experiment with a new format.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Our vision for the future is that there will be a Digital Workforce for every enterprise. Businesses will have a functioning Digital Workforce, and this tandem will be the key to digital transformation. Human workers will continue to provide strategy and creative thinking, Digital Workers will execute on business processes, and core IT will provide the underlying technology infrastructure and data storage. These Digital Workers will be cloud-based and easily scaled up or down to redeploy across the organization as business needs shift.
What is your favorite restaurant in London?
German Gymnasium Restaurant at Kings Cross.
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