Robotics expert Blue Prism sees bookings climb

Robotics and automation experts Blue Prism has announced a major platform release as it gave an update on its half year trading.

The Warrington-headquartered Aim-listed firm develops Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software, which helps large companies automate complex administrative tasks.

It revealed first half bookings for the six-month period ending 30 April 2021 were £98m, up 35% from last year.

Gross and net retention rates were 98% and 115% respectively, and there was a closing cash position of £126m.

Closing Annual Recurring Revenue was £168m on a comparable basis.

Based on current figures the group full year revenues for 2021 to be towards the lower end of the £170-£180m guidance range and an EBITDA loss for the year of £25m.

Jason Kingdon, chairman and CEO, said, the group was reinvesting in its offering having released nine new products which will be followed by a major platform release taking the company “towards programmable infrastructure, with enhanced cloud offerings and enterprise strategic automation as our clear direction.”

He said: “Our multi-tasking software robots that work directly from human readable process description documents greatly increase the scale, productivity and capacity of our digital robots to carry out end-to-end complex process automations.

“Our approach moves us away from the current RPA definition towards a greatly enhanced model for robot productivity, along with strategic business outputs and support for strategic digitisations and automation capabilities.

“We see this deeper theme as central to Blue Prism’s refined mission with enterprise models for desktop in scope too.

“Evidence from customers, is that the direction is very welcome and very differentiated.”