Sources: Automation Anywhere, backed by SoftBank's Vision Fund, is planning for an IPO later this year or in 2022; the company was valued at $6.8B in 2019
Context & Ripple Effects
Automation Anywhere's arc has been fast: after a Series A at a $1.8B post-money valuation in mid-2018, it took SoftBank's Vision Fund money that November at $2.6B with 1,500 enterprise customers on the books, and by 2019 sources put its value at $6.8B. An IPO would convert that Vision Fund position into public currency.
The move follows the playbook already set by its closest rival: UiPath, last valued at $10.2B, confidentially filed for an IPO in December 2020 targeting the first half of 2021. The two enterprise-automation leaders are converging on the public market at nearly the same moment, which will make their filings read as direct comparisons.
First-order effects
- SoftBank's Vision Fund gets a defined liquidity path on its $300M stake, bought at a $2.6B valuation that has since roughly doubled-plus to $6.8B — a mark it needs to realize through exits rather than new marks.
- Automation Anywhere moves from private fundraising cadence to quarterly disclosure, putting its enterprise-customer base and growth rates directly against UiPath's in public filings.
Second-order effects
- UiPath's earlier filing becomes the pricing template: whatever multiple the public market assigns UiPath's automation revenue will anchor how investors price Automation Anywhere's offering months behind it.
- For enterprise buyers, a two-way public race between UiPath and Automation Anywhere pressures both to defend customer counts and expansion rates, tightening terms in the robotic-process-automation market they dominate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, SoftBank keeps recycling portfolio stakes into public listings — the same exit machinery it later applied when Arm targeted a $60B-$70B IPO — making IPO timing a core Vision Fund return driver rather than an afterthought.
- Enterprise process automation consolidates from a category of well-funded startups into one judged by public-market metrics, where scale and disclosure, not fundraising rounds, decide who can keep acquiring.
The trend: Enterprise automation vendors are graduating from SoftBank-era private valuations to public markets, with UiPath and Automation Anywhere turning robotic-process automation into a publicly benchmarked category.