Prospectus Summary
PROSPECTUS SUMMARY This summary highlights selected information contained elsewhere in this prospectus. This summary does not contain all of the information you should consider before investing in our Class A common stock. You should read this entire prospectus carefully, including the sections titled “Risk Factors,” “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations,” and our consolidated financial statements and the related notes included elsewhere in this prospectus, before making an investment decision. Unless the context otherwise requires, all references in this prospectus to “UiPath,” the “company,” “we,” “our,” “us,” or similar terms refer to UiPath, Inc. and its subsidiaries. Our fiscal year ends January 31. Our fiscal quarters end on April 30, July 31, October 31, and January 31. References to fiscal years 2019, 2020, and 2021 in this prospectus refer to our fiscal years ended January 31, 2019, 2020, and 2021.Our Mission
Our mission is to unlock human creativity and ingenuity by enabling the fully automated enterpriseTM and empowering workers through automation.
Overview
The modern enterprise is complex as employees must navigate an ever-increasing number of systems and applications to perform their day-to-day work. This dynamic forces workers to constantly execute manual, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks to get their work done. The friction faced by workers often results in lost productivity that can have a direct impact on a company’s bottom line. Traditional automation solutions intended to reduce this friction have generally been designed to be used by developers and engineers, rather than the employees directly involved in executing the actual work being automated. As a result, employees are limited by the lack of flexibility of these traditional automation technologies causing employee productivity, innovation, and satisfaction to suffer.
Our platform is designed to transform the way humans work. We provide our customers with a robust set of capabilities to discover automation opportunities and build, manage, run, engage, measure, and govern automations across departments within an organization. Our platform leverages the power of artificial intelligence, or AI, based computer vision to enable our software robots to perform a vast array of actions as a human would when executing business processes. These actions include, but are not limited to, logging into applications, extracting information from documents, moving folders, filling in forms, and updating information fields and databases. Our robots’ ability to learn from and replicate workers’ steps in executing business processes drives continuous improvements in operational efficiencies and enables companies to deliver on key digital initiatives with greater speed, agility, and accuracy.
Our platform enables employees to quickly build automations for both existing and new processes. Employees can seamlessly maintain and scale automations across multiple deployment options, constantly improve and evolve automations, and continuously track and measure the performance of automations, all without substantial technical experience.
At the core of our automation platform is a set of capabilities that emulates human behavior, which provides our customers with the ability to automate both simple and complex use cases. Automations on our platform can be built, consumed, managed, and governed by any employee who interacts with computers, resulting in the potential for broad applicability of our platform across departments within an organization. Society is at a turning point in how organizations execute work, and we believe the ability to leverage software to enrich the employee experience will unlock tremendous value and efficiency opportunities. While we are still in the early days of a multi-year journey to the fully automated enterprise, momentum is growing as organizations across the world are only now beginning to understand the power of automation.
We believe that the success of our land-and-expand business model is centered on our ability to deliver significant value in a very short time. We grow with our customers as they identify and expand the number of business processes to automate, which increases the number of robots deployed and the number of users interacting with our robots. Our ability to expand within our customer base is demonstrated by our dollar-based net retention rate, which represents the rate of net expansion of annualized renewal run-rate, or ARR, from existing customers over the last 12 months. Our dollar-based net retention rate was 153% and 145% as of January 31, 2020 and 2021, respectively. See the sections titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis Financial Condition and Result of Operations—Key Factors Affecting Our Performance” for additional information regarding our dollar-based net retention rate and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis Financial Condition and Result of Operations—Key Metric—Annualized Renewal Run-Rate” for additional information regarding our ARR.
As of January 31, 2020, we had 6,009 customers, including 80% of the Fortune 10 and 61% of the Fortune Global 500. As of January 31, 2021, we had 7,968 customers, including 80% of the Fortune 10 and 63% of the Fortune Global 500. Our customers span a variety of industries and include Adobe, Applied Materials, Chevron, Chipotle Mexican Grill, CrowdStrike, CVS Health, Deutsche Post DHL, EY, Generali, KDDI, SBA Communications, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and Uber Technologies, Inc.
We have experienced rapid growth. Our ARR was $351.4 million and $580.4 million in the fiscal years ended January 31, 2020 and 2021, respectively, representing a growth rate of 65%. We generated revenue of $336.2 million and $607.6 million, representing a growth rate of 81%, and a net loss of $519.9 million and $92.4 million in the fiscal years ended January 31, 2020 and 2021, respectively. Our operating cash flows were $(359.4) million and $29.2 million and our free cash flows were $(380.4) million and $26.0 million in the fiscal years ended January 31, 2020 and 2021, respectively. See the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis Financial Condition and Result of Operations—Non-GAAP Financial Measures—Non-GAAP Free Cash Flow” for additional information on free cash flow, a non-GAAP measure.
Our Industry
Explosive Growth of Cloud-Based Applications Creating a New Era of IT Complexity. Businesses around the world are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to adopt applications that help advance digital transformation and drive competitive advantages. As a result, enterprises have transitioned from managing a handful of multi-purpose, largely on-premises applications to managing hundreds and even thousands of specialized point solutions deployed across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
The Benefits of Digital Transformation Have Yet to Make Their Way to the Workforce. Modern enterprise applications enable deep and nuanced functionalities. However, despite massive functional advancement, the true promise and potential of digital transformation—reallocating human capital towards cognitive, higher-value activities—remains elusive, which is limiting improvements in productivity.
Individual Business Processes Rely on Multiple Business Applications, and Workers to Orchestrate Them. The proliferation of specialized applications has resulted in humans being the connective tissue in an enterprise, working across a wide range of applications that individually are not built to address the needs of the actual processes they are supporting.
Automation is the New Frontier of Competitive Differentiation. Enterprises are demanding a new approach to unify, tailor, and run applications without significant information technology, or IT, resources or changes to existing infrastructure. With the ability to emulate human behavior, this new approach to automation is disrupting traditional automation and transforming data processing work by allowing customers to find efficiencies without materially changing business processes and supporting infrastructure.
Empowering Workers to Automate their Personal Workflows is Leading to a Democratization of Automation. The combination of technology that can emulate human behavior and a workforce with the knowledge and tools to create their own automations has enabled enterprises to begin to automate a significant number of use cases, from individual tasks to enterprise-wide processes.
Cost of Skilled Human Capital is Accelerating the Evolution Towards the Fully Automated Enterprise. The cost of skilled human capital continues to rise due to growing demand. We believe it is increasingly imperative for enterprises to leverage automation to liberate workers from menial, repetitive, and less productive tasks and to better utilize the positive qualities that only humans have, such as abstract thinking, making connections, dealing with ambiguity, creativity, innovation, passion, and community engagement. We believe this will drive business value and greater employee engagement.
Limitations of Existing Offerings
A number of technology companies have attempted to address the automation needs of organizations through the application of business process management, application development platform offerings, robotic process automation, or RPA, tools, and AI point offerings, as well as other horizontal software applications. However, these existing offerings are challenged by a number of inherent limitations, including:
Lack of An End-to-End Platform. Many existing automation software offerings are point technologies and cannot offer end-to-end automation capabilities on an integrated platform, which inhibits visibility, insight, and context for discovering and building additional automations.
Not Capable of Emulating Human Behavior, Relying too Heavily on APIs. Many existing offerings do not effectively integrate AI computer vision and machine learning, or ML, capabilities needed to accurately identify and emulate human actions in conjunction with application programming interfaces, or APIs. Without these capabilities, organizations are limited to pursuing automation only within the narrow pathways permitted by existing APIs.
Inability to Automate Across Applications. While business processes typically involve multiple applications, many existing automation capabilities are built into specific applications and are limited in their ability to automate business processes across multiple applications. Accordingly, enterprises build inefficient business processes to compensate for limited cross-functional automation capabilities.
Difficult to Link AI Capabilities to Execution. AI and ML, or AI/ML, capabilities are needed to automate cognitive, high-value tasks. In recent years, enterprises have made significant investments in developing AI/ML models. However, it is difficult to leverage these models as the environments for developing them, typically used by data scientists, are distinct from the environments where work processes are carried out, typically by employees using enterprise applications. This separation of environments limits the ability of an organization to deploy models that are necessary to automate complex processes.
Need to Change an Enterprise’s Underlying Infrastructure. Existing offerings generally are unable to emulate the human’s role in executing a business process, requiring organizations to make significant changes either to their applications and infrastructure or to the business processes themselves.
Unable to Realize Full Value of Automation Throughout an Organization. Existing solutions do not typically make automations accessible to everyone within the organization as they are often built with non-intuitive user interfaces, or UIs, and code heavy technology stacks. These solutions are too technical for most knowledge workers, limiting their application to a small number of use cases and users with significant developer experience.
Lack Governance Capabilities at Scale. Existing offerings do not typically offer centralized, secure governance capabilities to enforce, manage, and deploy organizational development standards.
Difficult to Deploy. Existing automation solutions generally require complicated, invasive implementation processes that, in turn, require extensive upfront and ongoing training and time commitment. This makes it difficult to build and maintain automations, resulting in the persistence of manual processes throughout enterprises.
Lack of Openness and Interoperability. Many existing solutions are not modular and lack the ability to integrate new, third-party technologies and operate with customized applications. Enterprises using these solutions are locked into a limited set of proprietary options not built for the future.
Lack of an Engaged Community of Automation Developers. Many existing automation vendors do not have open platforms and have not invested the time and resources required to cultivate a vibrant ecosystem of automation developers that freely exchange innovations and best practices.
Our Solution and Key Strengths
We are at the forefront of technology innovation and thought leadership in automation, creating an end-to-end platform that provides automation with user emulation at its core. Our platform leverages computer vision and AI to empower robots to emulate human behavior and execute specific business processes, eliminating the need for employees to execute certain manual and mundane tasks. Our platform allows employees to focus on more value-added work and enables organizations to seamlessly automate business processes ranging from those in legacy IT systems and on-premises applications to new cloud-native infrastructure and applications without requiring significant changes to the organization’s underlying technology infrastructure. Our platform is purpose-built to be used by employees throughout a company and to address a wide variety of use cases, from simple tasks to long-running, complex business processes.
Broad Set of Complementary Solutions. Our platform combines computer vision, AI, ML, RPA, and process-discovery capabilities to enable automations across deployment environments, systems, and applications. We provide our customers with a comprehensive set of capabilities to discover, build, manage, run, engage, measure, and govern automations across departments and personas within an organization or agency.
Open Architecture. Our platform embraces an open ecosystem with hundreds of enterprise application integrations that have been built by both UiPath and the UiPath community of technology partners. Our solution includes a variety of pre-built activities and connectors so customers can quickly create and deploy robots that execute operations and seamlessly interact with third-party systems. Our open ecosystem is architecture agnostic, which allows organizations to automate existing infrastructure and accelerate digital innovation without the need to replace or make large investments in their existing infrastructure.
Built-In AI/ML Capabilities. We incorporate proprietary AI/ML into our products to drive continuous improvement of workflows. Our AI/ML capabilities broaden the applicability of our solution to address complex use cases. Our platform can learn from human interactions to continuously improve the quality and accuracy of AI algorithms and ML models.
Human Emulation Enables Addressing Expansive Use Cases. Our robots emulate human behavior and are adaptable to constantly changing external variables. Our robots’ ability to emulate human behavior allows organizations to leverage our platform to address a myriad of use cases, from the simple to the complex. We believe that the power of our platform is only limited by the use cases that human users can conceive.
Built for Enterprise Deployment. Our platform grows with our customers as they increase the automation footprint across their organizations. Customers can deploy our platform on-premises, in a public or private cloud, or in a hybrid environment. Our platform has been architected with security and governance at its core allowing our customers to seamlessly grow their automation footprints while giving their IT departments the tools to establish necessary guardrails around the automations.
Adoption Across Workers and Functions. We make automation accessible to workers throughout an organization. Workers can interact with our robots in many of the same ways that they would interact with humans.
Simple, Intuitive, Quickly Deployed. Our platform is easy to use. Automations can be quickly and efficiently deployed across an organization, creating immediate time-to-value.
Resilient Automations. Our platform was built to emulate the actions of a human interacting with applications and systems to execute processes. Our robots can emulate human behavior by leveraging our proprietary AI-based computer vision capabilities to adapt and respond to changes in work environments such as interpreting highly varied document types or navigating unstable UIs. Our proprietary, AI-based computer vision also allows for increased reliability and accommodation to changes in display resolution, scale, and UI changes. In addition, we have developed a variety of features that are designed to enable resiliency in the process and execution of building automations.
Integrated and Portable AI/ML Models. Our platform enables companies to easily deploy, manage, and improve AI/ML models built by our customers or third parties allowing for greater allocation of human capital towards business problems and use cases. Our pre-trained AI/ML models have been designed for deployment and customization without the need for a data science or technical background.
Automation Performance and Business Outcome Analytics. Our platform tracks, measures, and forecasts the performance of automations enabling customers to gain powerful insights and generate key performance indicators with actionable metrics.
Built for Collaboration. Our platform was designed for people and robots to work together, allowing each to focus on the processes they execute best. Robots execute the time-consuming, manual processes that make work less interesting and satisfying, freeing up humans to think more creatively, innovate, solve complex problems, and improve customer experiences.
Accelerating the Adoption of Automation within the Enterprise
The adoption of our platform is fueled by the virality of our products, which together help organically scale our solution within an organization from the bottom up. Most of our customers start their automation journey with the development of a Center of Excellence, or COE. The COE focuses on building automations for simple, widely applicable tasks and provides those automations to the employee base to use in their day-to-day work right from their desktop. As employees become increasingly familiar and comfortable with automations, they start to build useful automations on their own, and submit these to the COE for assessment and, once approved, these automations are then deployed to the rest of the organization. This flywheel continues, spreading development across the entire enterprise and helping organically surface numerous automation ideas that likely could not be achieved through a traditional top-down approach.
Key Benefits to Organizations
Our end-to-end platform is purpose-built to power the fully automated enterprise. Our platform is designed to remove the friction that exists across employees and departments by improving transparency, promoting collaboration, and allowing people to focus on the work that matters. We enable organizations to implement highly customized, agile, and fast automations with lower overall IT infrastructure costs, with the goal of creating short time to value, improved efficiency, and increased innovation. Our platform provides the following key benefits to organizations:
Empower Customers to Deliver on Digital Initiatives. Our platform helps organizations accelerate innovation, increase productivity, drive competitive differentiation, and enrich employee and customer experiences by reducing the time to complete work from days and hours to minutes and seconds, allowing employees to focus on more mission-critical and innovative work.
Build Business Resiliency and Agility into Digital Business Operations. Our platform provides customers with the necessary flexibility to operate under constantly changing conditions and offers customers a virtually unlimited digital workforce capacity that operates 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
Fast Time-to-Value. We believe our solution delivers immediate return on investment. Our platform is designed to be easy to install and intuitive to learn and use, minimizing the need for lengthy and expensive implementation and training.