UiPath and it's moats

UiPath is a Robotic Process Automation(RPA) company with a $35 billion valuation. RPA is the holy-grail of automation for heavily repetitive rule-based systems. It can emulate human interactions to execute various tasks. This automation is based on software robots that can automate tasks that usually would have to be done manually by a person. RPA is quite similar to GUI testing tools, where you can see the software mimicking mouse and keyboard inputs and recording responses from the system.

There are a few moats built into this. The first one is scale. If it works on one system, it can be replicated for all systems in a business. With low marginal cost. The second one is learnability. These systems typically use computer vision algorithms to detect user interfaces to correctly determine the next step to be performed. These get better with time. The third moat is that it helps business to separate out tasks that can be made efficient by handing it over to the bots freeing up more time for it’s employees to do the harder and challenging tasks.

A key advantage of RPA is that it can be applied to almost all kinds of businesses. Expansion is possible in 2 dimensions. Both horizontally, from one vertical to another, and vertically, exploring the depths of an industry. The best part is that what it learns in one industry can then be used in another context for another interest. Essentially, what UiPath is doing is to create a toolbox of automation tasks that it can teach it’s army of robots and deploy to almost any software/tech business in the world.