Robotic process automation provider Automation Anywhere Inc. today announced that it has secured $200 million in new financing.

The financing was provided by Hercules Capital, Silicon Valley Bank and SVB Capital, the venture capital arm of Silicon Valley Bank’s parent company.

“We continue to be optimistic about the near-term opportunities for Automation Anywhere, as more companies scale automation and use the flexibility of our cloud platform to mitigate the impact of global events and navigate market challenges,” said Automation Anywhere co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mihir Shukla (pictured). “The financing enables us to expand on our mission to unleash human potential by helping every company build a digital workforce and succeed with automation.” 

Automation Anywhere provides a popular robotic process automation, or RPA, platform, that companies use to streamline repetitive business chores. The platform can observe how a company’s employees perform a task such as loading data from one application to another. Then, the platform creates a software bot that can carry out the task automatically.

Automation Anywhere has built a cloud-based interface that allows business users to create bots without writing any code. Companies with advanced requirements can optionally add custom code to their bots in order to enhance their capabilities. To ease development, Automation Anywhere provides a catalog of pre-packaged automation workflows for common enterprise use cases.

The startup’s platform also includes several other components. It includes AARI, a tool that enables workers to instruct an RPA bot to perform business tasks using natural language commands. Another offering automates the process of extracting data from documents, a task that companies frequently perform as part of the business workflows they automate using Automation Anywhere’s platform.

The $200 million financing round startup announced today follows a $290 million Series B investment that closed in 2019. The Series B investment was led by Salesforce.com Inc.’s venture capital arm. At the time, Automation Anywhere disclosed that its platform has been adopted by more than 2,800 customers, including 1,600 enterprises. 

“Our cloud strategy is working and is efficient, and with over 80% of our business being cloud, our over 50% revenue growth and strengthening margins have risen to the level that we believe $200 million is more than sufficient capital to see us through to profitability,” said Automation Anywhere Chief Financial Officer James Budge.

Automation Anywhere competes with UiPath Inc., which also provides an RPA platform for automating business tasks. UiPath generated $242.2 million in revenue last quarter, a 24% improvement over the same time a year earlier. The company’s dollar-based net retention rate, a metric that tracks the extent to which existing customers increase their spending over time, reached 132%.

Both UiPath and Automation Anywhere have expanded into new parts of the automation software ecosystem over recent quarters to support revenue growth. UiPath in August acquired Re:infer Ltd., a startup with a machine learning platform that can automate common business tasks. Automation Anywhere earlier acquired FortressIQ Inc., which offers software that helps companies find opportunities to make their business operations more efficient. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE