As an important tool for enterprise digitization, RPA has been very popular in China in recent years. Especially since the US RPA software giant UiPath successfully landed on the New York Stock Exchange, there has been a wave of RPA financing in China.
In fact, as an important field of domestic enterprise service track, RPA track is not a new field, China has the world's largest potential RPA market. IDC predicts that by 2023, the global RPA market will reach $3.9 billion. Among them, China's RPA market will continue to expand rapidly from 2021, and its proportion in the global market will increase to more than 25% by 2023.
｜1. What is RPA?
RPA, which stands for Robotic Process Automation, is the use of software with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks that previously required employees to perform. These tasks can include queries, calculations, and maintenance of records and reports. .
The emergence of RPA technology, which consists of software robots that can imitate human workers, has gradually freed the human labor force from tedious and repetitive work, so that more energy can be allocated to deal with valuable work . It has also become the best "digital employee" of the company.
Traditional RPA technology can be traced back to the Macroinstruction function in Excel 5.0 released by Microsoft in 1994. With the maturity of database and programming technology, a three-piece low-code software development kit for modern RPA has gradually formed, that is, the process Designer, Control Center, Robot.
In the past few years, the industrial digital transformation that has been carried out in full swing around the world has made the use of digital means to reduce costs and increase efficiency to become the consensus and core appeal of most enterprises. According to the RPA research report released by Deloitte, if you calculate a Fortune 1000 company with a revenue of 20 billion US dollars and 50,000 employees, 20% of the workflow can be automated with RPA, then it can bring more than 3,000 employees every year. million dollars in profit.
It is foreseeable that with the continuous deepening of industrial digitization , it is an inevitable trend of development that RPA replaces inefficient labor in a more efficient way. At the same time, with the decline of the domestic "labor dividend", the demands of domestic enterprises to "reduce costs and increase efficiency" are becoming more and more urgent. It has gradually become a trend to promote the application of automation technology to partially replace "repetitive labor" to improve efficiency and control costs.
At present, the number of RPA applications deployed by some large domestic enterprises has reached hundreds, which can reduce the manual error rate to 0.1%, and the operation efficiency is equivalent to 5 to 15 times that of manual labor. This significant alternative advantage makes RPA the indisputable "best digital employee" in the digital age.
The huge market prospect of RPA is that digital transformation is still a high priority demand of domestic enterprises. RPA can combine advanced technology applications and help enterprises achieve "hyper-automation" by virtue of "non-invasive integration, high efficiency, agility, scalability" and other characteristics and cost reduction.
2. The popularity of RPA investment continues
Under the verification of the strong digital demand on the enterprise side and the high valuation of overseas capital markets, the RPA track has won the favor and blessing of capital.
On the whole, the number of investments and the total amount of financing in the RPA industry at home and abroad show an upward trend, and the investment and financing enthusiasm is still high . From a domestic perspective, in 2021, 15 domestic manufacturers have received a total of 19 financings, with a total of 3.4 billion yuan, and the overall valuation is also approaching 23 billion yuan. A total of 3 financing events occurred in 2022Q1, with a total financing of 124 million US dollars and an average single financing amount of 41.397 million US dollars. Compared with the 5 financing events in the same period in 2021, the number has decreased, and the total financing has increased by 53.26%. The amount of a single financing increased by 141.4%. It is estimated that the market will reach 8.18 billion yuan in 2024, and by 2025, the global RPA market will reach 22.5 billion US dollars. This shows that the domestic RPA industry as a whole is still growing and expanding, and it is still favored by capital.
The attention of "RPA+AI" and super automation continues to rise. From the perspective of the key business direction of the invested companies, in the first quarter of 2022, capital will continue to be optimistic about "RPA+AI"3. Another thing worth paying attention to is the hyper-automation track, which has also received continuous attention from capital in recent years. In 2021, the hyperautomation track received 3 investments involving 2 companies, namely Jiuke Information and Hongji Cyclone. The 2022Q1 hyperautomation track is still favored by capital, and there were 2 investment and financing events in the field of hyperautomation, namely SKAEL in the United States received US$38 million in Series A financing led by RTPGlobal, and Hyperscience in Bulgaria received US$100 million in Series E financing led by Tiger Fund. On the whole, the RPA investment field is more diversified, and the attention of RPA+AI and hyperautomation continues to rise.
｜3. Innovative players are gaining momentum
At present, both domestic and foreign, professional RPA manufacturers represented by Optimistic Data, Yunzhao Technology, etc. have gradually formed a brand echelon, and they have huge advantages in financing, users, technology, products, etc. .
In terms of financing, innovative RPA manufacturers have performed well in terms of valuation level and financing amount. Take UiPath, a well-known foreign innovative RPA representative manufacturer as an example, it has received multiple rounds of financing as early as 2020, and has created a new market value of 35.9 billion US dollars a few trading days before its listing. Looking back at the domestic market, some well-known innovative RPA manufacturers such as Rulai Technology and Shadow Knife RPA have successively obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in financing, and their valuations have risen all the way.
In terms of products, the advantages of innovative RPA manufacturers are more obvious . At present, there are two main mainstream products provided by innovative manufacturers in the RPA field: one is desktop RPA, and the other is server RPA. Among them, related companies including Yunkuo Technology, Jiuke Information, Laiye Technology, Hongji Cyclone and other related companies can provide RPA products in these two aspects. In addition, its application fields cover different fields such as finance, human resources, sales, operation and maintenance, etc. The technology covers web page automation, PDF automation, email automation and other fields, with relatively clear coverage and market positioning, and has a high penetration rate in the RPA market.
In addition, the progressive lightweight, tool-based, and integration-seeking characteristics of innovative RPA make it easier to adapt to third-party systems and integrate into large-scale IT infrastructure. Its product adjustment is less difficult, the implementation cycle is shorter, and the It is easy for users to enjoy the dividends of industry development.
However, while there are many commonalities among innovative RPA vendors, there are still differences in their specific market positioning. At present, according to the different positioning of RPA manufacturers, they can be divided into two categories: one is for tools; the other is for platforms. The representative of the former is UiPath, which will provide users with product learning materials and personally help users to build processes and deploy implementation; the representative of the latter is Blueprism, which tends to provide large customers with a unified robot operation platform to help teams implement, Form an industry-level application platform. But no matter what type of vendor it is, the overall development momentum of innovative RPA vendors is relatively rapid.
｜4. RPA+AI has landed in many fields
A market survey on the application of RPA in the domestic industry by RPAPlus, a Chinese RPA industry consulting platform, shows that the three most widely used RPA industries are from the financial sector, namely banking, securities and insurance.
In the financial industry, RPA can be applied to multiple links in financial scenarios, from bank loan approval to securities transaction settlement, to insurance application claims; AI can distinguish which jobs can be replaced by machines (technical capabilities) and which must be done by humans .
Fintech company Abbots Yuzhou once said at the CCF-GAIR conference that in the process of upgrading RPA+AI, when the work and process of RPA robots are more vertical and subdivided, the more they can play the role of machine learning. advantage, the more professionally trained it can be,
Corresponding to the financial industry, RPA robots need to have the ability to process massive amounts of financial unstructured data. IDC has given relevant statistical results, more than 80% of the data in the enterprise is unstructured data, and the annual growth rate is 60% according to the index.
｜Summary
From a global perspective, in the first quarter of 2022, the popularity of RPA investment and financing activities continued to rise, and the total investment and financing volume and volume reached a new high. The RPA+AI field is still favored by capital. From a domestic perspective, the normalization of the new crown epidemic in the past two years has further catalyzed the RPA market to enter an outbreak period, and innovative companies are emerging . According to the law of industry development, in the future, frontrunners will also appear, and your robot colleagues may also be in production. .
