We are trying to create a bot economy: Automation Anywhere's Ankur Kothari

Automation Anywhere is a robotic process automation software company founded by four Indians — Ankur Kothari, Mihir Shukla, Neeti Mehta, and Rushabh Parmani— in 2003. The San Jose-headquartered company, which has almost 400 out of its global workforce of close to 750 in India, on Tuesday announced a fund raising of $250 million, valuing the firm at $1.8 billion. It was dubbed as one of the largest A rounds by any enterprise software company. In an interaction with Bibhu Ranjan Mishra, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer Ankur Kothari talks about the road ahead. Edited excerpts:

What does this funding mean for you?
 

What we are seeing is a huge inflection in this market, where the acceleration is happening at a fast pace. We thought the timing is right to raise this round and also to have the right partners in this journey. We are leaders in this space and we want to accelerate our lead in a big way by investing in products, customers and global expansion. NEA, Goldman Sachs, General Atlantic and WiL are the right mix of partners that allow you to achieve a dream of creating a product platform and scaling up in the global market.

Why did you abstain from external funding till now?

It is not that we are against it. Every year we plan exponential growth, and then we see if our capital is enough. And if our capital funds it, life is great. We have always outperformed on every front and never needed the capital because we kept on self-funding growth. Then we said, if we run out of capital we will go to investors, but we kept on signing customers after customers and kept on becoming bigger. Capital was never a problem. We were profitable almost 7-8 years ago and with zero debt in the balance sheet.

Give us a brief on how the journey started in 2003-04. How did the four of you came together?
 

When we looked at the problem those days, we found that people were largely integrating their applications through (application programming interface) APIs. However, only less than 5 per cent of the systems have APIs, and even if you bring APIs for every system, it would require 60 per cent manual intervention from programmers to do the integration. So we thought, this is not how it will be solved. It is easier to put five people on the job and move data from here to there. We said if we can create a product that can mimic a human being, interact with a system, move data from one system to another and can make rule-based algorithmic decisions just like a human does, it can tackle the issue. 

Automation is the buzzword in the industry now. How has been your growth all these years?
 

If you look at the adoption of automation, it happened in three phases. The first eight years when it was used by a lot of firms mainly in US but it was used more at a departmental level. Then came the next phase which started just after the recession ended in 2013 when people started openly talking about it. Now we are in the middle of the next phase when pretty much every single company globally is adopting it.  We are almost growing at triple digit growth rate every year in terms of revenue and number of robots.

How do you want to leverage this funding in your next phase of growth?
 

This is one of the largest series ‘A’ funding in enterprise software segment, which is testimony to the fact that the market has huge potential. Couple of months ago, we launched a first-of-its-kind market place for bots. We are trying to create a bot economy. In the bot store, a lot of users and partners are creating reusable bots almost like an app store, where they can download the app and plug and play.