Automation Anywhere Inc., a Silicon Valley-based company founded by Indian-origin entrepreneurs, has raised $290 million (Rs 2,081.35 crore at current exchange rates) in a Series B funding round.
The round was led by Salesforce Ventures, the investment arm of cloud solutions and customer relationship manager provider Salesforce, Automation Anywhere said in a statement.
The company, which focusses on automating entire business processes, said that existing investors such as SoftBank and Goldman Sachs also took part in the round.
The latest funding takes the company’s post-money valuation to a whopping $6.8 billion. That’s more than double its valuation in the previous financing round.
The company had raised a total of $550 million in its Series A round last year. It had first mopped up $250 million in July 2018 from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, private equity firm General Atlantic and other investors at a valuation of $1.8 billion. In December last year, it raised $300 million from SoftBank Vision Fund, valuing the company at $2.6 billion.
Automation Anywhere said it will use the fresh capital to enhance its artificial intelligence-powered automation platform. It will also increase its focus on improving human-to-bot collaboration with a view to enhancing customer experiences and increased employee productivity.
“This new funding reinforces the promise of the RPA (robotic process automation) category and empowers our customers to achieve greater business agility and increased efficiencies by automating end-to-end business processes,” co-founder and CEO Mihir Shukla said.
The RPA is a fast-evolving technology which uses software robots to automate entire business processes. The company works with large traditional enterprises to achieve process automation using natural language processing, deploying the software alongside human workforce.
The company was co-founded as Tethys Solutions in 2003 by Shukla, Ankur Kothari, Neeti Mehta Shukla and Rushabh Parmani. Shukla is a veteran in Silicon Valley, with more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry.
Revenue chief Kothari is a computer engineer from the University of Mumbai and a post-graduate in computers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Neeti Mehta Shukla has an MBA degree from Bond University, Australia. Parmani studied computers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
