Robotic processing automation firm UiPath Inc. announced a couple of key acquisitions at its Forward III conference in Las Vegas today alongside a swath of improvements to its RPA platform.

Backed by a billion dollars in venture capital funding, UiPath is one of the darlings of the booming RPA market, an emerging subset of artificial intelligence that uses software robots to observe workflows in common business applications and then deduce ways to automate repetitive tasks.

What UiPath does is create software “robots” that monitor users’ individual keystrokes as they interact with applications such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management, identifying repetitive patterns and suggesting ways to automate them. Eliminating a few keystrokes may seem trivial, but the savings can be enormous when applied to hundreds or thousands of users over long periods of time. Automation also reduces errors and improves speed.

UiPath’s new acquisitions include StepShot OÜ, a provider of “process documentation” software that’s used by companies to record, document and share processes and automate key steps in robot creation. UiPath has also bought a “process mining” company called ProcessGold International B.V., whose software is used to build process intelligence applications for business process improvement.

Financial details of the acquisitions were not disclosed, but UiPath has worked fast to integrate the company’s technologies into its own platform. The result is the launch of a new product called UiPath Explorer, available in the latest release of the UiPath Platform. The idea with Explorer is to help users get a more detailed understanding of what each business process involves, and what aspects of those processes can be automated.

UiPath Explorer helps customers come up with a more scientific approach to planning their automation strategies, company officials said. It works by first identifying new business processes, then prioritizing them according to how important they are and how much time can be saved. Finally, it helps users come up with a way to automate those processes.

“Explorer will sniff around and track what’s happening in SAP, Excel, et cetera and recall the activity and identify any repeatable patterns,” Prabhdeep Singh, UiPath’s vice president of AI, said in an analyst briefing.

The Explorer tool is one of several new features to make its debut in UiPath’s new platform release that are all about helping customers find new business processes to automate and decide on the best way to complete those tasks.

UiPath Apps, for example, is a new capability that helps to enable continuous interaction between workers and UiPath’s robots across entire processes. With UiPath Apps, it’s now possible to communicate with robots even as they’re executing unattended processes and manage approvals and exceptions on the fly, a capability that UiPath describes as “Human-in-the-Loop.”

Users can get more insights into their RPA operations too, thanks to UiPath Insights, a new feature that provides embedded analytics for the various processes it automates.

UiPath is also throwing in some new tools for so-called citizen developers. UiPath StudioX is a “low-code” platform for workers without coding skills to build their own customized robots to automate new processes they’ve identified.

Finally, UiPath Connect Enterprise is a new capability that allows every employee at an organization to help find new processes to automate.

The company noted that building a pipeline of automations requires human judgment as well. Connect Enterprise includes a crowdsourced gamification capability to help what the company calls “robotic operations centers of excellence” manage a pipeline of robots to free employees from mundane tasks.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE he thought UiPath’s updates were exciting because enterprises are increasingly implementing acceleration strategies to try to move faster and become more agile.

“One of the main strategies is RPA, and UiPath is expanding its capabilities in this area with its next generation platform,” Mueller said. “It’s always good to make things easier for users, and that’s what UiPath is doing with its StepShot acquisition. More importantly, UIpath also gets into the fast-growing area of process mining, which is highly complementary to RPA, with the acquisition of ProcessGold.”

More broadly, said Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon, the UiPath’s approach appears to be resonating. “Based on market and spending data I see, UiPath continues to distance itself from the pack,” he said, thanks to “their more open, simpler model and what customers say is a very good product.”

UiPath said its new release will be made available in a phased rollout starting later this month.

Photo: UiPath