Item 1. Business
Item 1. Business
Overview
First established in a Bucharest, Romania apartment in 2005, UiPath was incorporated in Delaware in 2015 as a company principally focused on building and managing automations and developing computer vision technology, which remains the foundation of our platform today. Since that time, we have evolved from our beginnings in RPA into an end-to-end AI-powered Business Automation Platform through development and acquisitions, have launched new products, and have expanded our operations across the globe. Our vision is to enable automation across all knowledge work to accelerate human achievement. We are leading a new era of workforce productivity, inspired by the rise of business automation platforms across enterprises everywhere.
The UiPath Business Automation Platform is The Foundation of Innovation™. We provide our customers with a robust set of capabilities that allow them to discover opportunities for automation, automate using a digital workforce that seamlessly collaborates with humans, and operate a mission critical automation program at scale. Our platform allows customers to integrate AI with automation, enabling automation to take action based on learning and experience. It enables employees to quickly build automations for both existing and new processes and to automate a vast array of actions including, but not limited to, logging into applications, extracting information from documents, moving folders, filling in forms, reading emails, and updating information fields and databases. The ability of our platform to replicate steps performed by humans in executing business processes drives operational efficiencies and enables companies to deliver on key digital initiatives with greater speed, agility, and accuracy.
AI-powered automation is here, and its momentum is continuing to grow as organizations around the world begin to understand the combined power of automation and AI to drive efficiency and accelerate business outcomes. We aspire to be the defining business automation platform, advancing the evolution of automation and AI as a way of working and a catalyst for continuous reinvention.
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Trends Shaping Our Industry
A fragmented application landscape complicates business processes and hinders digital transformation. Businesses worldwide have spent billions of dollars on software in an attempt to drive efficiency and competitive advantages. A proliferation of applications has resulted in a shift from traditional software suites to specialized point solutions. Enterprises have transitioned from managing a handful of multi-purpose, largely on-premises applications to managing hundreds or thousands of point solutions deployed across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. These applications, which were generally not designed for interoperability, run in tandem with legacy technologies, relying on humans to act as the connective tissue in the performance of business processes. As a result, employees lose valuable time navigating a fragmented application landscape and attention is diverted away from more cognitive activities that could directly improve business outcomes.
Recent advancements in AI are enabling automation of sophisticated business processes and broader use cases. While RPA can easily capture data and manipulate applications like a person would, automation of certain more complex and cognitive tasks has historically been out of reach. The evolution of AI, which refers to decision-making capabilities demonstrated by computer programs, has now enabled the automation of processes with characteristics—such as high variability, inherent uncertainty, and unstructured data—that would have been impossible to automate with RPA alone. AI expands capabilities by enabling automations to learn how to read, write, listen, recognize patterns, and make complex decisions, bringing automation to a new level by opening a world of new opportunities for business growth, cost reduction, and improved productivity.
Resource constraints are driving enterprises to invest in end-to-end process automation.
Enterprises are under pressure to improve operational efficiency, maximize the productivity of their employees, and scale their businesses. This is even more critical in the current macroeconomic climate. Inflationary tensions have caused resource constraints for organizations, driving them to become more cost-conscious and seek new opportunities for innovation and transformation. Investment in enterprise automation for end-to-end processes allows organizations to devote human capital resources to the highest value tasks that humans do best, such as abstract thinking, innovation, relationship building, and dealing with ambiguity.
Automation of personal workflows can lead to a democratization of automation.
Employees must navigate an ever-increasing number of systems and applications and execute many manual and repetitive tasks in the performance of their day-to-day work, leading to frustration and lost productivity. While traditional automation solutions have attempted to address this friction, they frequently fall short of expectations because they have been designed for use by developers and engineers, rather than the employees who are directly involved in and familiar with the work being automated. By contrast, low-code solutions require little technical expertise and empower employees to use their firsthand knowledge of business processes to easily automate their personal workflows, resulting in personal and organizational benefits.
Competition
The market for automation is one of the fastest growing enterprise software markets and is increasingly competitive. We believe our competitors primarily fall into the following categories:
• Enterprise platform vendors that are acquiring, building, or investing in automation and AI functionality or partnering with automation and AI providers.
• RPA software providers that offer RPA platforms, but lack end-to-end automation capabilities.
• Adjacent automation and integration platform companies in markets such as low-code, BPM , iPaaS , process mining, IDP , and test automation, that provide additional features that can be useful for automations.
We have alliances and integrations with key vendors in each of these groups, but they often develop and market automation capabilities as extensions of their core platforms.
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, RPA tools,
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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;
• immature UI and API automation capabilities;
• challenges in linking AI capabilities to real-world execution;
• lack of proprietary datasets relevant to automation;
• need for changes to an enterprise's underlying infrastructure;
• unsuitability for organization-wide use;
• lack of governance capabilities at scale; and
• lack of an engaged user community.
What We Offer
Our platform is purpose-built to be responsive to these challenges and to advance the next generation of automation with several key strengths:
• Our platform’s embedded AI, ML, and NLP capabilities improve decisioning and information processing by adapting to constantly changing variables.
• Our software robots’ ability to emulate human behavior allows organizations to address a myriad of use cases, from simple to complex, across levels and departments.
• Our platform allows users to seamlessly design and combine UI automations, API integrations, and AI-based document understanding in a single workflow.
• Our multi-tenant platform is built for enterprise deployment, with security and governance at its core, and can be deployed on-premises, in a public or private cloud, or in a hybrid environment. In addition, we offer a managed, multi-tenant SaaS version called Automation Cloud™, which enables our customers to begin automating without the need to provision infrastructure, install applications, or perform additional configurations.
• Our intuitive interface and low-code, drag-and-drop functionality is easy for employees to learn regardless of their technical acumen; built-in, customizable, and shareable components serve as building blocks for users to quickly and easily build and deploy automations.
• Our platform tracks, measures, and forecasts the performance of automations, enabling customers to gain powerful insights and generate key performance indicators with actionable metrics.
• Our technology democratizes automation, empowering employees and resulting in greater professional fulfillment and job satisfaction.
• Our platform was designed to enable people and automations to work together in harmony, with each focusing on the processes they execute best, to improve business outcomes.
The UiPath Business Automation Platform
Our platform is built to span the full automation spectrum and is at the center of the way our customers run their businesses—sitting between their application landscape, their processes, and their people—allowing their processes and people to move forward at the rate that they need to, and turning AI's promise into real-world impact.
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Discover
Identify the highest-ROI opportunities for continuous process optimization and automation using the power of AI
Process mining uses data from business applications to give organizations a detailed understanding of their business processes and how to automate and improve them.
Task mining provides an objective, data-driven picture of employees' desktop activities without disrupting ongoing work, allowing organizations to identify process improvement areas or automation candidates.
Communications mining lets users mine, monitor, and automate service conversations, finding the value in these communications to unlock insights and improve the experience of their customers.
Idea capture & management enables organizations to centrally capture and manage automation ideas and process improvements and to prioritize them based on KPIs.
Automate
Rapidly build AI-powered automation that seamlessly collaborates with people and systems to transform every facet of work
UI and API automation are combined for maximum scale and speed across the broadest range of apps and systems, building automations that "see" components of dynamic interfaces with the power of AI.
Low-code development empowers employees to build business apps and automations rapidly with low-code, visual tools, making automation—and innovation—available to everyone.
Generative AI and experiences expand automation's impact and address a broader range of business challenges, stretching the limits of what's possible.
Intelligent document processing and specialized AI remove the work from paperwork with semantic understanding of a wide range of documents—accurately and quickly.
Process orchestration automates cross-functional business processes and allows seamless collaboration between software robots and humans.
Operate
Establish an enterprise-grade foundation to run and optimize a mission-critical automation program at high scale
Real-time and trend analytics provide context for data-driven automation decision-making and strategy.
Continuous testing delivers low- and no-code and coded automated testing across the entire testing lifecycle, with AI-powered features to boost efficiency.
Unified management and governance allows organizations to monitor the integrated platform and their automation programs centrally, enabling them to scale quickly—and responsibly.
Cloud-first flexibility offers AI-powered enterprise-ready automation instantly with SaaS, or allows organizations to self-host for data isolation or regulatory compliance needs.
Our Growth Strategies
Customer Acquisition and Expansion— We have simplified our go-to-market approach to drive a level of alignment that we believe will result in refined market segmentation, higher sales productivity, and better customer experience. We sell automation not merely as a tool, but as a way of operating and innovating, and emphasize the ability of our platform to deliver meaningful business outcomes for our customers.
We sell our platform through a direct sales team, supported by a team of pre-sales engineers and our professional services organization, who offer technical expertise to help customers accelerate adoption and time-to-value. We also sell through channel partnerships, as well as with systems integrators, and are focused on maintaining and growing a high-quality ecosystem of partners that build, train, and certify skills on our technology as well as those that deploy our technology on behalf of their customers.
We sell to organizations of all sizes across a broad range of industries and geographies, with a focus on enterprise customers. In certain geographies, we maintain specialized teams that concentrate on specific verticals such as financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and public sector. We've designed our go-to-market engine to divide our customer base according to propensity to invest in automation, and we strive to align our coverage model accordingly:
• Enterprise— We dedicate a higher density of resources and coverage to Forbes Global 2000 companies with the highest propensity to invest in and potential to adopt automation at scale. We believe these accounts represent our largest growth opportunity. Here we focus on selling positive business outcomes that resonate with C-level executives and leverage our largest partners for customer enablement. Dense
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coverage ratios and industry alignment of sales teams allow us to accelerate both new customer acquisition and usage expansion.
• Corporate and Mid-Market— For corporate and mid-market accounts, which are in the earlier stages of their automation journey, we use a partner-led approach and provide resources to support our partners. Our customers frequently see rapid time-to-value with our products, and we are able to quickly expand sales within organizations as customers add features, expand use cases, and increase the number of automations beyond their initial deployment. The broad applicability of our platform enables us to sell across all levels and departments of an organization, affording opportunity for eventual graduation to the enterprise level.
• Small and Mid-Sized Business— We seek to sell to the smallest companies primarily through our most efficient partner-led, self-service, and digital channels, focusing on low-cost, durable customer acquisition. In addition, we are developing opportunities for product-led growth, which will enable us to speak to users within the product to organically nurture adoption and sell additional capabilities.
Our sales efforts are complemented by our marketing initiatives, which build brand and category awareness, cultivate a large and growing community, and drive demand through a combination of global and local campaigns. We employ a variety of approaches to reach prospective customers, including community evangelism, in-person and digital events, content marketing, digital advertising, search optimization, partner marketing, social media, and public relations. We host and present regularly at regional and global events, including our own Forward and Together conferences, as well as our AI Summit and DevCon events.
Platform Investment and Innovation— We intend to deliver additional outcomes for our customers by expanding our platform. We have made and plan to continue to make significant investments in research and development to enhance our technology. For example, in May 2023, we released version 23.4 of the UiPath Business Automation Platform, which enhanced the built-in AI capabilities of the platform, including native delivery of Communications Mining and enhanced IDP functionality. In November 2023, we released version 23.10 of the UiPath Business Automation Platform, which included improvements to UiPath Automation Cloud™ and new process and task mining features, offered a preview of our newest set of AI-powered experiences, UiPath Autopilot™, and added coded automations, which allow developers to build test automations directly in code.
Strategic Acquisitions— We have acquired businesses and technologies to drive product and market expansion. For example, in July 2022, we acquired Re:in f er , a provider of NLP software focused on unstructured documents and communications, laying the foundation for our Communications Mining technology, which has been a fitting complement to our existing IDP capabilities. We expect to continue to evaluate acquisition opportunities that we believe are complementary to our platform.
Community Engagement— We have built an extensive ecosystem through our Community, UiPath Academy and Academic Alliance initiatives, which support and train individuals working with our platform. Additionally, we offer free access via our Community Edition and Enterprise Trial, both available online. (Community Edition is a limited version of our platform that is offered for free to small businesses, university students, and individuals, whereas Enterprise Trial provides full functionality for a limited time.) The result is a global network of automation professionals who are actively building and sharing automations and transforming the way work gets done. We believe that our highly engaged user community differentiates us from competitors and that helping individual users to build their skills will drive future adoption of our platform.
Customers
We have a large and diversified customer base across a broad range of industry sectors.
We determine our customer count by considering the number of accounts with a unique account identifier for which we have an active license or SaaS subscription in the period indicated, including entities to which we have sold our products either directly or through a channel partner. A single organization with multiple divisions, segments, or subsidiaries is counted as a single customer. Our customer count is subject to adjustment for acquisitions, consolidations, spin-offs, and other market activity. Non-paying partners and resellers and users of free or trial subscriptions are excluded from our customer count.
We had approximately 10,830 and approximately 10,800 customers as of January 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.
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Partners
We develop and maintain business and technology partnerships that help us to integrate the latest technology into our platform and to market and deliver our platform to our customers around the world.
Our business partners include global and regional system integrators, value-added resellers, and business consultants that enhance our market presence and drive greater sales efficiencies. In fiscal year 2024, we continued to refine our partner program to facilitate partners' ability to drive new customer acquisition and growth product adoption and implementation.
Our technology partners bring specialized capabilities to our platform. They collaborate with us to develop integrations that simplify the interoperability of our platform with their technology, resulting in faster time-to-value. Examples of integrations available to our customers include integrations with offerings from Amazon Web Services Inc., Adobe Inc., Alteryx, Inc., Atlassian Corp Plc, Box, Inc., CrowdStrike, Inc., DocuSign Inc., Google LLC, Microsoft Corporation, Oracle Corporation, OutSystems, Qlik Technologies Inc., Salesforce.com, Inc., SAP SE, ServiceNow, Inc., Snowflake Inc., Tableau Software, LLC, and Workday, Inc.
We also drive innovation with leading AI technology partners that specialize in OCR , NLP, and custom ML and AI algorithms that are additive to our platform and can enhance the long-term business outcomes of our customers’ automations. Additionally, we maintain partnerships with leading cloud vendors, such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Inc., and Microsoft Corporation, to both simplify the deployment of our platform and to extend our platform to offer customers the benefits of cloud-based AI capabilities.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property rights are important to the success of our business. We rely on a combination of patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret laws in the U.S. and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements with third parties, and other contractual protections, to protect our intellectual property rights, including our proprietary technology, software, know-how, and brand.
We continually review our development efforts to assess and identify the existence and patentability of new intellectual property, and maintain an active patent program that has enabled us to steadily build our patent portfolio over the past several fiscal years, as illustrated in the following chart:
As of January 31, 2024, we held 184 issued patents which are scheduled to expire between 2039 and 2044. As of January 31, 2024, we also had 166 pending patent applications in the U.S. (including 10 allowed U.S. patent applications), 124 pending Patent Cooperation Treaty applications, and 302 pending and 12 allowed patent
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applications in other jurisdictions. Our patent portfolio is aligned to and supports the UiPath Business Automation Platform as follows:
Discover Automate Operate
The terms of individual patents extend for varying periods of time, depending upon the date of filing of the patent application, the date of patent issuance, and the legal term of patents in the countries in which they are obtained. Generally, patents issued for applications filed in the U.S. are effective for 20 years from the earliest effective filing date of a non-provisional patent application. The duration of patents outside of the U.S. varies in accordance with provisions of applicable local law, but is typically also 20 years from the earliest effective filing date. However, the actual protection afforded by a patent varies from country to country and depends upon many factors, including the type of patent, the scope of its coverage, the availability of legal remedies in a particular country, and the validity and enforceability of the patent.
In addition to our patents, we held 18 registered U.S. trademarks and had 1 pending U.S. trademark application and more than 500 active foreign trademark filings as of January 31, 2024.
Although we rely on intellectual property rights, including patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, as well as contractual protections to establish and protect our proprietary rights, we believe that factors such as the technological and creative skills of our personnel, development of new services, features, and functionality, and frequent enhancements to our platform are equally essential to establishing and maintaining our technology leadership position.
We restrict access to and use of our proprietary technology and other confidential information through the use of internal and external controls, including contractual protections with employees, contractors, customers, and partners. We require our employees, consultants, and certain other third parties to enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements, and we control and monitor access to our software, documentation, and other confidential information. Our policy is to require all employees and independent contractors to sign agreements assigning to us any inventions, trade secrets, works of authorship, developments, processes, and other intellectual property generated by them on our behalf and under which they agree to protect our confidential information. In addition, we generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our customers and partners. See Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property , included in Item 1A of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, for a description of risks related to our intellectual property.
Government Regulation
Our business is and will continue to be subject to extensive U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations, including laws and regulations involving privacy, data protection, security, intellectual property, competition, taxation, anti-corruption, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering, use of artificial intelligence, and other similar laws. Many of these laws and regulations are still evolving and are likely to remain uncertain for the
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foreseeable future, and these laws and regulations can vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The costs of complying with these laws and regulations are high and are likely to increase in the future. Further, the impact of these laws and regulations may disproportionately affect our business in comparison to our competitors that have greater resources.
In the U.S., we are subject to data security and privacy rules and regulations promulgated under the authority of the Federal Trade Commission, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the CCPA , and other state and federal laws relating to privacy and data security. The CCPA requires covered businesses to provide new disclosures to California residents and to provide them with new ways to opt out of the sale of personal information, and provides a private right of action and statutory damages for data breaches. Other jurisdictions in the U.S. are beginning to propose laws similar to the CCPA.
As a result of our global operations, we must comply with many data security and privacy laws that may vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Virtually every jurisdiction in which we operate has established or is in the process of establishing data security and privacy legal frameworks with which we or our customers must comply. Our failure to comply with the laws of each jurisdiction may subject us to significant penalties. For example, the data protection landscape in Europe, including with respect to cross-border data transfers, is currently unstable and other countries outside of Europe have enacted or are considering enacting cross-border data transfer restrictions and laws requiring local data residency.
We must also comply with sanctions that are issued by countries in which we do business. In response to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, the U.S., the EU , the U.K. , Australia, Japan and other countries have imposed sanctions on Russia. Russia has also imposed sanctions. Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine represent an immaterial percentage of our business.
We may also be subject to increasing levels of regulation with respect to ESG matters. For example, the SEC and the state of California have recently adopted or are considering the adoption of rules that require companies to provide expanded climate-related disclosures, and the EU adopted the CSRD . Compliance with these developing regulations may cause us to incur additional costs.
For a discussion of the various risks we face from regulation and compliance matters, see Risk Factors—Risks Related to Data Privacy and Cybersecurity and Risk Factors—Risks Related to Regulatory Compliance and Governmental Matters included in Part I, Item 1A of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Human Capital
Our People
Our people are our most important asset and are key to our success. We seek to attract passionate people with a growth mindset who are excited to improve the future of work.
In our pursuit of accelerating human achievement, we strive to provide equal opportunity and to foster a culture of inclusion. We have received several awards in recognition of our culture and our workplace from Comparably over the past few years (calendar 2021, 2022, and 2023). Our rewards programs are designed to be competitive and to attract, retain, and motivate high-performing employees. We evaluate individual performance based on achievement of OKRs and demonstration of behaviors aligned with our values , and use a consistent performance management approach globally where legally possible.
As of January 31, 2024, we had a total of 4,035 full-time employees, geographically distributed as follows:
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The following chart presents the distribution of our full-time employees by financial statement line as of January 31, 2024:
We are subject to local labor law requirements in all countries in which we operate. We consider our employee relations to be good and have not experienced any work stoppages.
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Our Values
We believe that our values serve as our compass, guiding our culture, strategy, and behaviors. Embedding these values into everything we do is critical to our success and helps up deliver value to our customers, employees, and stockholders.
Humble
Keep an open mind. Cultivate kindness. Be a team player. Check your ego.
Bold
Speak up. Act with courage. Make decisions. Think big.
Immersed
Dive deep. Be passionate. Own what you do. Be customer centric.
Fast
Practice agility. Prioritize simplicity. Drive results. Be proactive.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
We believe that DEI is key to creating an environment where our people feel safe to be themselves, are empowered to grow their careers, are rewarded competitively, and are challenged to do their best work while embracing the power of automation.
We focus on overall global representation in our hiring, development, promotion, and retention for all demographics. We have evolved our hiring approach to include talent mapping and have streamlined our recruitment process to provide a positive candidate experience, which has resulted in excellent offer acceptance rates.
We signed the CEO in Action pledge in support of the largest business-led initiative to advance DEI in the workplace; as a signer, we have invested in the creation of our employee affinity groups, which we call People Unity Councils, as a part of developing community amongst a truly global team in a hybrid work environment.
Social Responsibility and Community Initiatives
We have built an employee-led giving strategy through which our employees can support charities of their choosing via donation of time, money, or both. We further support the charitable pursuits of our people by allotting additional paid time off for activities with social impact. Our employees have volunteered, for example, in building homes for those without, feeding those in need, and in teaching children valuable technical and life skills.
To further support our mission, vision, and strategy, we are committed to making automation a force for good in the world. We have invested in research, collaborations, and partnerships to develop solutions that help address global challenges and increase the positive impact of automation on people and our planet. We have supported initiatives dedicated to improving automation skills and technology access and creating social good with our free online learning platform, UiPath Academy. Working with our partners to develop accessible paths toward fulfilling careers and foster meaningful employment opportunities remains a priority for us, and we have expanded our network of partner organizations to equip students with automation skills as part of our UiPath Academic Alliance program. We also train and certify our own employees as citizen developers to automate mundane tasks, which promotes empowerment and engagement.
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We also founded the UiPath Foundation, an independent non-governmental, non-profit, non-political, and non-religious global organization based in Romania, which aims to provide children living in poverty with the skills and tools necessary to reach their full potential.
At the time of our IPO in April 2021, we pledged to donate equity as a member of Pledge 1%, a global corporate philanthropy movement; as of January 31, 2024, we have donated 0.6 million shares of our Class A common stock to fund projects related to our environmental, social, and governance initiatives, with an additional 2.2 million shares of our Class A common stock reserved for distribution by April 2031.
Corporate and Available Information
We were first established in Bucharest, Romania in 2005 and incorporated in Delaware on June 9, 2015. Our principal executive offices are located at One Vanderbilt Avenue, 60th Floor, New York, New York 10017, and our telephone number is (844) 432-0455.
The UiPath logo, “UiPath,” “Automation Cloud,” "The Foundation of Innovation," and our other registered and common law trade names, trademarks, and service marks are the property of UiPath, Inc. or our subsidiaries. Any other trade names, trademarks and service marks used in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of their respective owners.
Our website address is www.uipath.com. Information found on, or accessible through, our website is not a part of, and is not incorporated into, this Annual Report on Form 10-K. We file electronically with the SEC our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act. We make available on our website at www.uipath.com, free of charge, copies of these reports and other information as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC. The SEC maintains an internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov.
We may use our website as a distribution channel for material company information. Financial and other important information regarding UiPath is routinely posted on and accessible through our website at www.uipath.com. We therefore encourage investors and others interested in UiPath to review the information that we make available on our website, in addition to following our filings with the SEC, webcasts, press releases, and conference calls. In addition, interested parties may automatically receive email alerts and other information about UiPath when they enroll an email address by visiting “Resources” under the "Investor Relations" section at www.uipath.com.
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