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Robotic process automation unicorn UiPath today announced the acquisition of StepShot and ProcessGold. Tech and teams from the two companies are being brought onboard in order to give enterprise customers more tools to track and identify workflows.
The UiPath RPA platform first got started in 2016. Last fall, UiPath raised $225 million, only to add a $568 million round roughly six months later at a $7 billion valuation. Recent funding was used in part to reform the UiPath platform, company VP of AI Prabhdeep Singh told VentureBeat in a phone interview.
“I think that what we are seeing is the maturity of the RPA as an industry, where we need to build the next set of tools, in addition to our existing product lines,” he said.
UiPath Explorer Expert records processes with StepShot for things like filing invoices and HR onboarding. That information is then handed to an RPA developer and serves as a kind of spec sheet that tells them what to build.
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“As an enterprise, you are well-buttoned down and have a set of well-defined processes in your enterprise, in which case you can identify those processes with this tool that we are calling Explorer Expert,” Singh said.
For less defined processes, UiPath is introducing Explorer Enterprise, which utilizes ProcessGold tech.
Explorer Enterprise figures out typical paths people take in their jobs in order to identify variations between their approaches, any parts of the process that are taking longer than usual, and what the optimal path looks like.
“You can deploy the system in your enterprise, and we can monitor a whitelisted set of applications or we can monitor the logs at the back end of a system like SAP, or monitor logs from any LOB system you have. And the way we are going to be different is [that] our technology works right on the front-end side.”
“Our drivers can detect … the controls being clicked by people, … the applications that they’re using, [and] the control flows that the users go through.”
Also new with the latest version of the UiPath platform is Apps, products that let people with no coding background make things like forms and task inboxes, and Insights to measure how RPA operations match with strategic goals.
New integrations with GSuite, Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, SAP, and other SaaS solutions were also announced.
The latest version of the UiPath platform with the new StepShot and ProcessGold tech will be made available to all UiPath Cloud users later this month and to on-premise users next month. Insights will be available in Q1 2020.
In other UiPath news, in an exclusive conversation with VentureBeat earlier this year, UiPath CPO Param Kahlon said the company is considering creating its own conversational AI platform.
Work on the platform continues, Singh said, and a version for call centers is due out in the next six months.
