Software specialist unveils interim results and £80m acquisition

Alastair Bathgate

Blue Prism, the Warrington-based multinational software corporation that pioneered and makes enterprise robotic process automation software, reported better revenues but deeper losses today.

It also announced the acquisition of Thoughtonomy in a deal worth up to £80m.

In the six months to April 30, sales jumped more than 80% to £40.4m, however, pre-tax losses widened from £5.5m last year to £35m.

The increased loss primarily related to continued investment in the group’s international growth strategy, with significant investments in sales, marketing, product and underlying business infrastructure, outlined earlier this year.

Chief executive Alstair Bathgate, said: “I am delighted with our progress in the first half of 2019, with an increase in deal momentum driven by the new commercial framework which we introduced to make Blue Prism easier to adopt.

“We have a good track record of helping customers scale, which provides an opportunity to upsell this new cohort.

“The RPA (robotic process automation) market continues to develop into a significant software category, and we are increasingly well positioned to capitalise on this.”

He added: “We are investing into this opportunity, including the acquisition of Thoughtonomy, announced today, which is an important step in targeting the mid-tier and developing our enterprise cloud approach.”

In January 2019 the group raised £100m, before issue costs, to accelerate and underwrite its investment plans to capitalise on the market opportunity and reinforce its status as a market leader.

The firm said it had continued to invest in sales and marketing throughout the period to drive future growth with a 174% growth in its sales and marketing headcount.

This included new strategic hires with the appointment of chief sales officer, chief customer officer and chief marketing officer, all based out of the key US market.

The total headcount has risen from 273 last year to 703 at the end of the first half this year.

London-based Thoughtonomy is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based product and cloud services business that combines Blue Prism’s RPA platform alongside additional embedded and integrated artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud capabilities, including computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning to provide a cloud-based, on-demand, intelligent automation platform.

For the 12 months to April 30, Thoughtonomy had reported revenues of £9.8m and an adjusted operating loss of £3.6m. Adjusted revenues for the same period were £7.4m. Gross assets at May 31, 2018 were £5.6m.

Alastair Bathgate said: “I am very pleased to announce this strategic acquisition which provides Blue Prism with a turnkey SaaS product which combines the power of the connected-RPA with a fully integrated suite of premium quality AI and RPA capabilities, on demand.

“The product is available to customers without the overhead of setting up a dedicated infrastructure and as a result is ideal in serving the mid-tier of the market.

“We believe that the cloud will grow in importance across our enterprise customer base, and this acquisition will also help further our development of enterprise-based cloud products.”

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