Jumping 23% in its market debut yesterday, UiPath has had one of the largest software IPOs ever! What do investors need to know?
After Coinbase’s blockbuster debut last Wednesday, we’ve just witnessed another — albeit smaller — successful listing on the markets this week.
UiPath!
Who is UiPath and what does it do?
According to UiPath’s S1 filing: “We make software robots so people don’t have to be robots.”
Sounds great, but what does that mean exactly?
UiPath is considered one of the leaders in the fast-growing space of robotic process automation (RPA). As alluded to in its S1 filing, the company’s bread and butter is helping companies to find and automate the mundane tasks within their organizations using A.I. Things like invoice processing, payroll, employee onboarding, compliance…
(Yawn).
As boring as all this sounds though, the numbers around the RPA industry are anything but. According to a Gartner report last year, revenue in the industry is projected to reach $1.89 billion in 2021, an increase of 19.5% from 2020. In the same report, Gartner predicts that 90% of large organizations globally will have adopted RPA in some form by 2022, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reorganisation of workplaces across the world.
These trends were clearly reflected in the company’s IPO yesterday — UiPath closed its first trading day up 23% at a market capitalisation of $35.8 billion.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that UiPath actually went to market with a lower valuation than it received a few months previously. In February 2021, UiPath was privately valued at about $35 billion, giving it a share price of $62.28. For its IPO, it sold its shares at $56 a piece, giving the company a slightly lower valuation of around $31.5 billion.
Although the successful debut pushed its market cap back up over the $35 billion mark, one does have to wonder if this signals some jitters over the massively inflated valuations that companies are getting before they go public?
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