Manchester AI specialist formed in a pub acquired by New York-listed group
New York-listed AI specialist, UiPath, has acquired Manchester-based Peak, for an undisclosed sum.
Peak is an AI business that was founded in 2014 and has additional offices in Jaipur, India, and New York City, in the US.
The Peak AI platform optimises product inventory and pricing for businesses of all sizes and across a wide range of industries.
Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath, said: “With the acquisition of Peak, we are accelerating our mission to strengthen our vertical AI solutions strategy.
“When combined with the UiPath platform, Peak’s exceptional purpose-built AI applications will enhance our ability to provide solutions that optimise industry-specific use cases and deliver incredible value to customers.”
Peak enables customers to develop AI workflows, process data, and provide predictions that are used to optimise critical business processes through APIs or integrated web applications.
It also provides a new breed of AI-based decisioning applications that enable business users to make highly complex decisions such as planning inventory and optimising product pricing decisions.
Now, as part of UiPath, Peak’s solutions can scale globally and reach new industries, allowing customers and stakeholders the opportunity for continued growth and innovation.
In turn, Peak’s focus on accelerating AI adoption in sectors like retail and manufacturing will enable UiPath to accelerate market growth and deliver vertical-oriented, next generation AI-driven agentic applications with intelligence.
Richard Potter, Peak CEO and co-founder, said: “Joining forces with UiPath is the perfect next step for Peak at this stage of our journey, and I couldn’t be more excited.
“As automation and agentic AI converge, we’re entering a new era of possibilities for the enterprise.
“UiPath’s global reach, deep enterprise expertise, and unwavering commitment to AI innovation will enable us to accelerate our vision – empowering businesses with specialised decision-making AIs at scale.”
He added: “We are incredibly proud of what we’ve built, and as part of UiPath, we look forward to delivering even greater value to our customers while pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI in the enterprise.”
Peak was founded in 2014 by Richard Potter, Atul Sharma and David Leitch, who hit upon their idea over a pint in their local pub.
It secured £2.5m in Series A funding in a round led by London-based venture capital firm, MMC Ventures in September 2017, just over a year after it received seed investment led by Manchester-based Praetura Capital.
In September, 2018, private equity firm NorthEdge announced it had teamed up with Peak to develop a first-of-its-kind platform set to revolutionise deal origination in the private equity sector through the power of AI.
In early 2021 it closed a $21m Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Oxx, and in August that year was linked with a $50m investment from Softbank’s Vision Fund II.
