What Automation Anywhere sells
Automation Anywhere, Inc. is a software company in San Jose, California that builds robotic process automation (RPA) and, since 2024, agentic process automation. Its software drives business applications the way a person does, clicking through screens and reading documents, so a bank, hospital or manufacturer can automate a process without rebuilding the systems underneath it. The company was incorporated in 2003 as Tethys Solutions, LLC by Mihir Shukla, Neeti Mehta Shukla, Ankur Kothari and Rushabh Parmani, and took the Automation Anywhere name in 2010.
Shukla has been chief executive for the whole of that period and is also board chair. Neeti Mehta Shukla, his wife, is chief impact officer; Ankur Kothari is chief operating officer and a board member; Rushabh Parmani is chief customer officer. All four co-founders still appear on the leadership page, which is rare twenty-three years in.
Fifteen years without outside equity
Automation Anywhere took no institutional equity until 2018. The first product went on sale in 2003, and the founders have described starting the company from the guest bedroom of the Shuklas' house. Growth came from what customers paid rather than from funding rounds, and the company stayed small: its own materials counted over 500 enterprise customers at the start of 2017 and more than 1,100 by September 2018. By the time it launched its rebuilt platform in October 2019 it said the release incorporated feedback from more than 3,000 customers.
The funding, when it arrived, was large. On 2 July 2018 the company announced a $250 million Series A led by New Enterprise Associates and Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, with General Atlantic and World Innovation Lab, at a $1.8 billion post-money valuation. In November 2018 the SoftBank Vision Fund put in another $300 million, extending the same round to $550 million and the valuation to $2.6 billion. A $290 million Series B led by Salesforce Ventures followed on 21 November 2019 at $6.8 billion. Total equity raised across those events is $840 million.
The rewrite that moved the platform into the browser
Early RPA, including Automation Anywhere's own Enterprise 10 and 11 releases, ran as Windows client software against a database, which meant servers to provision and clients to patch. In October 2019 the company launched Enterprise A2019, a browser-based cloud-native rewrite that it said added more than 175 features across 40 product capabilities, shipped in more than 14 languages, and ran either on premises or in public, private and hybrid clouds. In March 2021 that platform was rebranded Automation 360.
Two acquisitions filled gaps around it. Klevops, a Paris company working with customers in finance, banking and telecommunications, was bought in August 2019 to coordinate handoffs between employees and bots; its technology became the attended interface later sold as Automation Co-Pilot. FortressIQ, a San Francisco process discovery startup, was announced in December 2021 to add computer vision that watches how work actually happens and turns it into automation candidates. Neither price was disclosed.
Agents, and what the company charges for
At its Imagine 2024 conference in Austin in June 2024, Automation Anywhere introduced an AI plus Automation Enterprise System built around AI agents, including AI Agent Studio for building agents on the customer's choice of foundation model. It has since named the category Agentic Process Automation and describes a Process Reasoning Engine that draws on the 400 million automations running on its platform. By its own account, agent and automation executions now total close to half a billion a year.
In November 2025 it acquired Aisera, whose self-service agents handle IT service management, HR and customer service requests, along with a team of more than 100 AI engineers. That deal set it against seat-priced service desk software: the company argues AI agents cut the number of ITSM seats an enterprise needs by up to 40%, and that it would rather charge for work completed. In the first quarter of fiscal 2027 it signed what it called the largest outcome-based deal in its history, where revenue follows deployment milestones rather than licences. By May 2026 it said its Autonomous Service Desk had fulfilled more than one billion IT service requests, resolving over 80% of employee requests on average.
What the numbers do and do not show
Automation Anywhere is private and states plainly that it does not disclose detailed financial information, so there is no reported revenue figure to cite. What it does publish is directional. Fiscal years end on 31 January. For the quarter ended 31 January 2026 it reported its tenth consecutive quarter of non-GAAP profitability and positive free cash flow, said AI-powered products accounted for 61% of software bookings, and reported 23% growth in the number of customers spending more than $1 million a year. Reporting the second quarter of fiscal 2027 in September 2026, it described double-digit growth in annual recurring revenue, revenue and bookings, a three-year run of non-GAAP profitability, AI bookings at close to 70% of new and upsell bookings, and a net promoter score of 72.
Getting there took cuts. In April 2020 the company reduced headcount and restructured parts of the business, citing the pandemic and the change it brought to the global economy. When it appointed a new chief financial officer in 2021 it said a priority was preparing the business to operate as a public company, but it has announced no offering.
Competition
UiPath remains the closest pure-play rival, and the two have traded enterprise RPA accounts for more than a decade. Microsoft is the structural threat, because Power Automate and Copilot Studio ride into accounts on existing Microsoft 365 and Azure agreements. Salesforce and ServiceNow compete from the application side, with Agentforce and platform workflow automation; after the Aisera deal, Automation Anywhere sells directly against ServiceNow's service desk seats, which is an awkward position given that Salesforce Ventures led its Series B.
Its counter-argument is execution. A language model can read a contract and decide what should happen, but it cannot on its own sign into a green-screen mainframe, navigate a customised SAP screen or post a ledger entry with an audit trail. Automation Anywhere sells the layer that does that, with role-based access control, data redaction for regulated data and human approval steps in front of transactions that move money. It also claims a cost argument: the company says complex workflows run about 20% more cost-effectively through its platform than through frontier models used alone. Partnerships reinforce the position. Azure OpenAI Service and Amazon Q are wired into the product, PwC India embedded its AI agents in a spend management suite in January 2025, and a collaboration with OpenAI on reasoning models was announced in early 2026, alongside EnterpriseClaw, built with Cisco, NVIDIA, Okta and OpenAI to govern agents across clouds, systems and desktops.
Where it stands
Twenty-three years in, Automation Anywhere is a founder-run private company with $840 million of equity behind it, a $6.8 billion valuation set in 2019, a profitable operating model on a non-GAAP basis, and a product line rebuilt twice: once for the browser and once for AI agents. Hertz used its agents over a single weekend to map roughly 150,000 body shop and tow yard locations across the United States, which is the kind of narrow, measurable job the company now leads with. The open questions are whether outcome-based pricing scales as predictably as subscriptions, and whether it can keep pushing into service management and finance while Microsoft bundles the low end of the market away.
