Robotics process automation startup UiPath raising $400M in at more than $7B valuation

By Kate Clark

UiPath,  a robotics process automation platform targeting IT businesses, is raising more than $400 million in Series D funding from venture capital investors at a valuation north of $7 billion, sources have confirmed to TechCrunch following a report from Business Insider.

We’ve reached out to the company for comment.

UiPath, founded in 2005, has raised $409 million to date, meaning the new round of capital will double the total capital invested in the startup, as well as its valuation. Its $225 million Series C, raised just six months ago, valued the business at $3 billion, according to PitchBook. UiPath is backed by top-tier investors CapitalG and Sequoia Capital,  which co-led its Series C, as well as Accel, Credo Ventures  and Earlybird Venture Capital,  among others.

The latest funding round is being led by a public institutional investor.

UiPath develops automated software workflows meant to facilitate the tedious, everyday tasks within business operations. RPA is probably a misnomer. It’s not necessarily a robot in the way we think of it today. It’s more like a highly sophisticated macro recorder or workflow automation tool, letting a computer handle a series of highly repeatable activities in a common workflow, like accounts payable.

For example, the process could start by scanning a check, then use OCR to read the payer and the amount, add that information to an Excel spreadsheet and send an email to a human to confirm it has been done. Humans still have a role, especially in processing exceptions, but it provides a way to bring a level of automation to legacy systems, which might not otherwise benefit from more modern tooling.

The company began raising private capital in 2015 and has since experienced rapid growth of its valuation and annual recurring revenue (ARR). UiPath garnered a$1.1 billion valuation with its Series B in March 2018, more than doubled it with its Series C and is again seeing a 2x increase in value with this latest round. This is a result of its swelling ARR.

The company says it went from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than two years. With its Series C, it counted 1,800 enterprise customers and was adding six new customers a day. Sources tell TechCrunch that UiPath did 180 million in ARR last year and is on track to do $450 million in ARR in 2019.

Source. Techcrunch. Kate Clark, March 21, 2019

Aurora Nets $530M Series B For Self-Driving Tech

By Mary Ann Azevedo

Self-driving car startup Aurora has raised $530 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital.

The round, which also included participation from Amazon and T. Rowe Price, is said to have lifted the three-year-old company’s valuation to over $2.5 billion, according to TechCrunch.

The Palo Alto-based company has been a standout in the autonomous vehicle space largely due to the caliber of its founding team, which includes pioneers in the field from Uber, Google, and Tesla. This round brings its total raised to date to $620 million. It raised a $90 million Series A in February 2018 from Greylock Partners and Index Ventures.

Although it was founded in 2016, Aurora didn’t emerge out of stealth mode until January 2018. The company is working on technology to develop Level 4 and Level 5 (fully autonomous in all circumstances) vehicles and has struck partnerships with large automakers such as Volkswagen and Hyundai.

As mentioned above, all three of Aurora’s founders—Sterling Anderson, Drew Bagnell, and Chris Urmson—are self-driving veterans. Crunchbase News’s Savannah Dowling reported last August, “Interestingly, in a tech world where brains and ego often go hand-in-hand, Aurora emphasizes character and lack of ego in its hiring process.” According to this CNN piece, “its values include ‘no jerks’ and ‘operate with integrity.’ “

Source. Crunchbase News, February 8, 2019

With huge new $450M funding round, Snowflake Computing has now raised almost $1 billion

In January, after raising $263 million, Snowflake Computing CEO Bob Muglia indicated that the next time his fast-growing cloud data warehousing company tapped the financing markets, it would likely involve an IPO. Plans changed.

Snowflake plans to announce Thursday that it has raised a new $450 million round led by Sequoia Capital. Existing investors, including Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, participated in the round and have now poured $923 million into the former Microsoft executive’s new company. The latest round comes with a pre-money valuation of $3.5 billion.

“I certainly didn’t see this coming in January,” Muglia said in an interview with GeekWire. “Simply put, the speed of our growth has increased so much that it’s really appropriate for us to get more capital.”

Snowflake built a data warehouse — a special kind of database designed for analytical applications — designed for the cloud computing era around its own database engine, and the company is “approaching $100 million in revenue,” Muglia said, which would be about four times the “tens of millions” figure he quoted back in January for 2017 revenue.

Headcount has doubled this year to 650 employees, and Snowflake is seeing an increasing number of deals valued at over $1 million, Muglia said. The company plans to reach around 1,000 employees by the end of this year, and plans to hire another 1,000 next year, including an expansion of its Bellevue engineering center.

An IPO is still on the table around 2020, Muglia said, which of course assumes the financial markets will remain intact that far into the future. Last August, the company hired former Talend CFO Thomas Tuchscherer, making the classic pre-IPO to grab a CFO who has experience taking a company public.

While the core data warehouse remains the main driver of Snowflake’s growth, Muglia foreshadowed Snowflake’s product roadmap by suggesting that the Snowflake Data Sharing feature on that data warehouse could evolve into a product of its own.

Now that everyone has figured out the value of “big data,” attention is turning toward ways to share massive amounts of data with trusted partners or suppliers, which is not an easy thing to do without resorting to one of those huge data boxes that cloud vendors sell to help new customers move their data.

“If the Snowflake data warehouse is disruptive, then data sharing is business transformative, and will really change the way people do business,” Muglia said.

This is shaping up to be an interesting trend in the evolution of data strategies, as cloud providers and enterprise software companies start rolling out integrations and partnerships designed to allow mutual customers to share data between their products. Just a few weeks ago, Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP unveiled a data-sharing partnership, and AWS and Salesforce rolled out something similar.

The new funding will allow Snowflake to expand its presence around the world, adding to a new engineering center in Berlin and hiring sales, marketing, and services employees in all major regions. Next year it will also increase the number of regions in which it is available on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure’s clouds, with plans to add 12 new regions across both cloud providers and introduce multiregion support for customers.

Source. Geekwire, Tom Krazit, October 11, 2018