India will become a global powerhouse for RPA: Daniel Dines, UiPath

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) provider UiPath is reiterating its focus on the India market, with enhanced market initiatives. Headquartered in New York, the company has over 50 partners and 219 customers in India. Having conducted a partners meet earlier this year in Mumbai, UiPath is looking at significantly increasing its teams in product engineering, sales, pre-sales, customer success and global customer support.

India success
In a recent development, UiPath has closed its series C funding, raising US$ 225 million at a valuation of US$ 3 billion. The round was co-led by existing investor CapitalG and new investor Sequoia Capital. Accel, which led both UiPath Series A and B rounds also participated in this round. The funding is also said to fuel a significant expansion of the company’s operations in India.

Sharing details about the company’s foray in India and growth story, Daniel Dines, Founder and CEO, UiPath, says, “In the beginning of 2014, one of the Indian BPO companies based in Chennai approached us for undertaking a pilot, which was one of the first RPA projects in the world. Following the successful pilot project, we discovered the market potential in India. Unlike our competitors who were present in the market, we had the leverage to build our solutions on the Computer Vision technology, which is a unique differentiator for us.”

KPMG in India has also joined forces with UiPath to enhance digital workplaces across the country. Under the partnership, KPMG and UiPath are jointly providing sophisticated Intelligent Automation solutions to drive value for clients by expediting operational processes, increasing agility and accuracy and lowering costs through automation.

Growth of RPA
Currently, the RPA industry is one of the fastest growing branch of enterprise technology. In the last three years, UiPath has marked growth of over 100 per cent. Dines informs, “With the adoption of RPA, one of our customers in the banking industry saved US$ 1.5 million. In terms of the India market, RPA is emerging as a strategic technology, because of the vast presence of the BPO sector and RPA’s role as a game-changer. With India’s huge workforce and talent, there’s also a big opportunity for developing expertise in the area of RPA. According to me, India will become a global powerhouse for RPA.”

In terms of use cases, Dines remarks that finance and accounting, procurement, supply chain management, HR and BPO have seen good adoption of the technology.

The company established its presence in India in early 2016; since then the country has been a significant part of UiPath’s go-to-market strategy. “Our success in India has been instrumental in our worldwide growth. We have all of our functions – such as sales, pre-sales, product engineering – in India. We have a huge partner ecosystem in globally, who also work with us in India and are instrumental in delivering our offerings. We focus on the entire spectrum of industries in the India market, alongside BPOs and domestic businesses. India is important not just in terms of revenue, but also as an influencer.”

UiPath is also banking upon emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for its offerings.

Expansion
Early in July this year, UiPath had announced that it had increased its annual recurring revenue from US$1 million to US$ 100 million. The company is expecting annual recurring revenue at the end of 2018 to increase by more than four times compared to that of 2017.

UiPath currently has three offices in India – in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Gurugram respectively – ans is looking to hire more engineers. The company plans to strengthen its India operations and product development capabilities by increasing the workforce from 250 to 1,200 by end of 2019, expand presence to eight cities including, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Kolkata, while ramping up workforce across all functions in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurugram.