UiPath Inc. today announced that it has acquired Cloud Elements Inc., a venture-backed startup with a software platform used by companies to integrate their business applications with one another. 

UiPath didn’t disclose the acquisition’s financial terms. The robotic process automation giant, which received a $35 billion valuation after a funding round this year, said Cloud Elements’ technology will advance its efforts to deliver so-called API-based automation.

Cloud Elements has developed a software platform that helps companies connect their internal applications with one another. A firm might, for example, wish to connect its sales automation tool with the marketing department’s analytics system to synchronize customer records between them. Such use cases require building an integration to bridge the application programming interfaces of the two workloads being linked.

Cloud Elements’ platform reduces the amount of manual work required to build API integrations. It includes more than 200 pre-packaged API connectors for applications from Salesforce.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., SAP SE and others. The startup’s platform removes the need for software teams to build connectors from scratch, which saves time, and in the same spirit of freeing up resources allows developers to reuse integrations across multiple applications.

The startup’s technology, UiPath said, will enable it to provide more API-based automation features for customers. 

RPA products such as UiPath’s platform use artificial intelligence bots to automate tasks that a company’s workers normally perform manually in business applications. In many cases, those bots don’t use the API of the application they’re helping to automate, but rather rely on the user interface. They observe what actions employees take in the interface to perform a given task and learn to replicate the workflow.

By bringing Cloud Elements’ API integration features into its platform, UiPath will make it easier for its customers to build automation bots that use not only an application’s interface but also its API. The latter approach provides advantages for certain RPA projects.

In particular, the API-based approach can lend itself better to automating applications that a company updates on a regular basis. When an application’s interface is updated, any automation bots that rely on that interface must often be modified as well, which takes up resources. The application’s API, in contrast, doesn’t necessarily change every time the user interface does, which means that configuring automation bots to use the API can reduce software maintenance requirements.

UiPath said Cloud Elements’ technology will extend the existing API-based automation it has built into its platform so far. Moreover, in addition to the startup’s software, UiPath is gaining additional API integration expertise through the deal that should advance its product development plans in this area.  

“The acquisition of Cloud Elements is just one example of how we are building a flexible and scalable enterprise-ready platform that helps customers become fully automated enterprises,” UiPath Chief Executive Officer Daniel Dines (pictured) said in a statement. 

Denver-based Cloud Elements raised about $47 million in funding prior to the acquisition from investors such as American Express Co.’s venture capital arm. The startup counts Xerox Holdings Corp., Capital One Financial Corp. and SAP among its customers. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE