For the purposes of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, the terms "we," "us," "our," "UiPath," and "the Company," refer to UiPath, Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries.
SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Securities Act") and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the "Exchange Act") about us and our industry that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including statements regarding our future results of operations or financial condition, business strategy, and plans and objectives of management for future operations, are forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “contemplate,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “target,” “will,” or “would,” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning the following:
•our expectations regarding our , revenue, expenses, and other operating results;
•our ability to acquire new customers and successfully retain existing customers;
•our ability to increase the number of users who access our platform and the number of automations built on our platform by our existing customers;
•our ability to effectively manage our growth and achieve or maintain profitability;
•future investments in our business, our anticipated capital expenditures, and our estimates regarding our capital requirements;
•the costs and success of our marketing efforts and our ability to maintain and enhance our brand;
•our growth strategies, including any further expansion into the top 25 countries as measured by gross domestic product;
•the estimated addressable market opportunity for our platform and automation generally;
•our reliance on key personnel and our ability to attract and retain highly-qualified personnel;
•our ability to obtain, maintain, protect, and enforce our intellectual property rights and any costs associated therewith;
•the effect of global events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or other public health crises and the effect of the Russian military operations in Ukraine, on our business, industry, and the global economy;
•our ability to compete effectively with existing competitors and new market entrants; and
•the size and growth rates of the markets in which we compete.
You should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We have based the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K primarily on our current expectations and projections about future events and trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition, and operating results. The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors described in Item 1A, , and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The results, events, and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements may not be achieved or occur, and actual results, events, or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.
In addition, statements that “we believe,” and similar statements reflect our beliefs and opinions on the relevant subject. These statements are based on information available to us as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. While we believe that information provides a reasonable basis for these statements, that information may be limited or incomplete. Our statements should not be read to indicate that we have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into, or review of, all relevant information. Such statements are inherently uncertain, and investors are cautioned not to unduly rely on these statements.
The forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements. Our forward-looking statements do not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, mergers, dispositions, joint ventures, or investments.
Item 1. Business
Overview
Our automation platform is designed to transform the way humans work. We provide our customers with a robust set of capabilities that allow them to discover automation opportunities and to build, manage, run, engage, measure, and govern automations across departments within an organization. Our platform leverages the power of artificial intelligence ("AI") based computer vision to enable our software robots to perform a vast array of actions as a human would when executing business processes. These actions include, but are not limited to, logging into applications, extracting information from documents, moving folders, filling in forms, and updating information fields and databases. The ability of our robots to replicate steps performed by humans in executing business processes drives continuous improvements in operational efficiencies and enables companies to deliver on key digital initiatives with greater speed, agility, and accuracy.
Our platform interacts with and automates processes across a company’s existing enterprise stack. As a result, our customers can leverage the power of our platform without the need to replace or change existing business applications, resulting in lower overall information technology ("IT") infrastructure cost. Our platform enables employees to quickly build automations for both existing and new processes. Employees can seamlessly maintain and scale automations across multiple deployment options, constantly improve and evolve automations, and continuously track and measure the performance of automations, all without substantial technical experience.
At the core of our automation platform is a set of capabilities that emulates human behavior and provides our customers with the ability to automate both simple and complex use cases. Automations can be built, consumed, managed, and governed by any employee who interacts with computers, resulting in the potential for broad applicability across departments within an organization. Many of our customers expand the scope and size of use cases across their organizations as they quickly realize the power of our platform.
We believe that the success of our land-and-expand business model is centered on our ability to deliver significant value in a short time. We grow with our customers as they identify and expand the number of business processes to automate, which increases the number of robots deployed and the number of users interacting with robots. We have an efficient go-to-market model, which consists primarily of an enterprise field sales force supplemented by a high velocity inside sales team focused on small and mid-sized customers, as well as a global strategic sales team focused on the largest global customers.
Our mission is to unlock human creativity and ingenuity by enabling the fully automated enterprise and empowering employees through automation. Our society is at a turning point in how organizations execute work, and we believe that the ability to leverage software to enrich the employee experience will unlock tremendous value and efficiency opportunities. While we are still in the early days of a multi-year journey, momentum is growing as organizations across the world are only now beginning to understand the power of automation. We believe that we are disrupting a significant and fast-growing market and that the largely untapped opportunity ahead of us has the potential to be one of the biggest ever in enterprise software.
Trends Shaping Our Industry
Explosive growth of cloud-based applications is creating a new era of IT complexity. Businesses around the world are spending billions of dollars to adopt applications that help advance digital transformation and drive competitive advantages. With the proliferation of cloud technologies and software-as-a-service ("SaaS"), traditional software suites have been disaggregated into point solutions. For example, human capital management software has been segregated across recruiting, payroll, benefits administration, and other key business functions. As a result, enterprises have transitioned from managing a handful of multi-purpose, largely on-premises applications to managing hundreds and even thousands of specialized point solutions deployed across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. These applications, which were generally not designed for interoperability, run in tandem with long-running, legacy technologies. The increasing volume of applications has a compounding effect on the complexity of business processes and the IT environments that support them.
The benefits of digital transformation have yet to make their way to the workforce. Modern enterprise applications enable deep and nuanced functionalities, such as conducting personalized marketing campaigns, predictive service delivery, and real time visibility of goods movement across the supply chain. However, despite massive functional advancement, the true promise and potential of digital transformation—reallocating human capital towards cognitive, higher-value activities—remains elusive, which limits improvements in productivity.
Individual business processes rely on multiple business applications, and humans to orchestrate them. While specialized applications deliver extensive functionality, they do not account for the full spectrum of how work gets done. The proliferation of specialized applications has resulted in humans being the connective tissue in an enterprise, working across a wide range of applications that individually are not built to address the needs of the actual processes they are supporting. As a result, activities performed by many employees today are still manual, mundane, and administrative, taking their focus away from higher-value activities that can directly improve business performance.
Manual and repetitive tasks have a negative impact on employee experience. Employees must navigate an ever-increasing number of systems and applications to perform their day-to-day work. This dynamic forces them to constantly execute manual, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks to get their work done. The friction faced by employees often results in lost productivity that can have a direct impact on a company’s bottom line. Traditional automation solutions intended to reduce this friction have generally been designed to be used by developers and engineers, rather than the employees directly involved in executing the actual work being automated. As a result, employees are limited by the lack of flexibility of these traditional automation technologies, and employee productivity, innovation, and satisfaction suffer.
Empowering employees to automate their personal workflows is leading to a democratization of automation. The emerging workforce is developing increasingly advanced technical skills and training in automation. Individuals are entering the workforce with higher expectations related to job impact, satisfaction, and efficiency, and view software as a driving force in realizing those expectations. As a result, organizations are seeking to empower employees with tools that optimize the more tedious parts of their jobs. Together, the combination of technology that can emulate human behavior and a workforce with the knowledge and tools to create their own automations has enabled enterprises to begin to automate a significant number of use cases, from individual tasks to enterprise-wide processes.