Automation Anywhere raises $250 million to make business processes self-running

Automation Anywhere (formerly Tethys Solutions), a San Jose, California-based robotic process automation (RPA) startup, today announced that it has raised $250 million in a funding round led by New Enterprise Associates and Goldman Sachs.

“With this investment, we are poised to extend our leadership in the multibillion-dollar RPA market,” CFO Clyde Hosein said in a statement. “We welcome the new investor group and look forward to their valuable contributions as we enter our next growth phase.”

Automation Anywhere’s platform employs software robots, or bots, that make business processes self-running. Using a combination of traditional RPA and cognitive elements such as unstructured data processing and natural language understanding, the system is able to crunch through tasks that normally take hundreds of thousands of human employees.

The company’s flagship solutions are IQ Bot, which learns by observing human behavior, and the Automation Anywhere Bot Store, a marketplace of prebuilt bots for common tasks.

The latest round of financing brings Automation Anywhere’s valuation to a whopping $1.8 billion, but it has the numbers to justify it. Total revenue and customer revenue grew 100 percent and 150 percent year-over-year, respectively.

The firm plans to spend the bulk of the new capital on deepening customer engagements in North America, India, Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, CEO and cofounder Mihir Shukla said in a statement. It also intends to invest in “specialized” machine learning capabilities and new integrations designed to drive “higher operational efficiency” and “flexibility.”

“Customers tell us that traditional process automation technologies are capable of automating only about 20 percent of an enterprise’s business processes,” Shukla said. “We believe our Intelligent Digital Workforce Platform can automate up to 80 percent of these processes. It’s a stark contrast and an enormous opportunity. The financing and our high caliber of investors strongly position us to push boundaries and drive the next major business disruption.”

Automation Anywhere was founded in 2003 and operates in over ten countries.