UK-based Blue Prism, a robotic process automation company that helps businesses automate HR, personnel, and more, raises €100M at a valuation of ~€1B
Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Blue Prism's €100M raise at roughly €1B lands it squarely in a market where the valuation gap is the story: UiPath went from a ~$120M Series B at a $1B+ valuation in 2018 to a $225M Series E at $10.2B just over two years later, while Blue Prism has grown more deliberately, adding AI capabilities through its acquisition of Thoughtonomy in 2019. The raise gives the UK RPA pioneer capital to keep pace as enterprise demand for back-office automation accelerates during the pandemic.
The arc matters because Blue Prism's ~€1B valuation here turns out to be roughly its ceiling — about 17 months later it agreed to be taken private by Vista Equity Partners for about £1.1B, a fraction of UiPath's private-market mark.
First-order effects
- Blue Prism gets a war chest to scale its HR and personnel automation platform against UiPath, which is out-raising it by an order of magnitude at each round.
Second-order effects
- UiPath's $10.2B valuation sets the benchmark buyers and investors use to price every RPA vendor, pressuring Blue Prism to justify its flat ~€1B mark with AI-differentiated product rather than headcount-driven growth.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to a bifurcating RPA market: hyper-growth leaders command venture-scale valuations while slower compounders like Blue Prism become private equity take-private targets, as Vista's £1.1B acquisition later confirmed.
The trend: Robotic process automation is splitting into venture-backed hypergrowth leaders and steady compounders that end up in private equity hands, with UiPath's valuation trajectory defining the gap.