— Uipath's majority shareholder, Coatue's "industry NO.1" preference
In April this year, the global RPA giant manufacturer UiPath was successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the market value once exceeded 35 billion US dollars, becoming the first stock in the RPA track, injecting a shot in the global RPA market at the same time, but also for the capital market set off a small boom, according to incomplete statistics, there are nearly 17 RPA financing events in China from January to July 2021!
Sought after by capital, from 2017 to 2020, the valuation of UiPath increased by about 100 times in 36 months; in February 2021, it received a $750 million Series F financing led by Alkeon Capital and Coatue, which made its valuation soar by 3 times, straight to the IPO.
In August, 4 months after uipath's listing, a domestic RPA vendor - Shadow Knife RPA suddenly disclosed its B round of financing, from the disclosure information, the lead investor of this round is Uipath's major shareholder Coatue Management, which completed the 50 million U.S. dollar B round of financing led by Hillhouse Venture Capital, GGV Jiyuan Capital, Red Dot China, GSR Venture Capital, etc.;
Coatue Management is a New York-based hedge fund with a long-term focus on the TMT track, investing most of its time in the global TMT secondary market since its inception. Since entering the Chinese market in 2014, it has invested in didi Chuxing, Meituan-Dianping, Heytea, Mafengwo and other enterprises, and it is not difficult to see its preference for "subdivision industry NO.1";
And Coatue, which has always been "the first in the industry", is the first time to enter the domestic RPA primary market and choose the shadow knife RPA, does it mean that the "Chinese version of UiPath" is about to appear? What are the qualities of shadow knife RPA that are favored by the former?
—— Completed 4 financings in 1 year, Shadow Knife RPA focuses on the e-commerce industry
It is understood that Shadow Knife RPA belongs to Hangzhou Fork Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., which is a core artificial intelligence enterprise focusing on the RPA field in Hangzhou, which was established in 2019. Counting the B round just disclosed in August, it has completed 4 financings in less than 1 year!
The capital is Coatue, Gaoling Venture Capital, GSR, Red Dot China, Chuxin Capital and other domestic and foreign first-line capital;
Industry insiders revealed that Shadow Knife RPA has chosen to take e-commerce industry enterprises as the core service object from the beginning, from its official website, Decathlon, BabyCare, Tomson By-Health, Hang Seng Electronics, OneNet One, Belle, Blue Moon, Baozun E-commerce, Chow Tai Fook and other tens of thousands of head e-commerce companies have become its product users. This piece is mostly from its core team from Ali, plus the headquarters in Hangzhou, an e-commerce highland, which can be seen. However, according to the author's understanding, the choice to focus on e-commerce is not only because of the e-commerce background of the core team, but also because of the long-term consideration of creating an RPA product that is available to everyone.
——Where is the threshold for e-commerce RPA industry services?
First of all, e-commerce has been developed in China for more than 10 years, is a highly mature digital industry, e-commerce enterprises in the operation, customer service, personnel, finance, data and other departments are filled with a large number of similar commodity order management, a variety of bill processes, data scraping and other high-repetitive work, these work is both important, but also very boring. Traditionally, it relies on manual completion by manpower, just imagine that the daily huge order processing of e-commerce companies is enough for customer service operators to have a headache. Working for a long time is easy to make mistakes, reducing the work satisfaction of employees, but also limiting the talent efficiency of enterprises, limiting the growth of enterprises, and the emergence of RPA is to solve the pain of human efficiency of e-commerce companies.
At present, most of the RPA vendors, including the RPA service provided by Uipath, have to rely heavily on their own technical team for service support due to the problem of product use threshold, the project implementation cycle is relatively long, and the fee is relatively high, which is not very friendly for e-commerce companies that rely heavily on digitalization. E-commerce is a high-speed changing industry, platform rules, industry gameplay changes very fast, today's enterprises in a certain scene pain point may not be implemented in the short term delivery, will change with the general environment. Therefore, for e-commerce RPA services, the changes in the industry have a great test for the comprehensive product service capabilities of manufacturers.
- "RPA Products for Everyone"
It is understood that the founder of shadow knife RPA, Jin Lijian, is a serial entrepreneur from the product manager, who was responsible for Ali RPA product projects, personally visited nearly 100 e-commerce companies to do in-depth research, and the feedback of the enterprise side presents two extremes, on the one hand, it is very recognized the value of RPA, but also complains about the high threshold for the use of RPA products, and this has become the original intention of choosing to leave Ali to start a shadow knife RPA, that is, to make an RPA product that everyone can use
The author downloaded the trial version from its official website, roughly browsed the product's video tutorials, a rough comparison of Uipath, UiPath Designer is in the main form into a variety of Sequence (sequence), displayed in the form of a box. Without unfolding the structure, the process is difficult to see at a glance, and the shortcomings of the sequence will be more obvious when encountering complex long processes and many logical branches.
To solve this problem, UiPath launched FlowChart Activity, which partially addresses the shortcomings of process design in the form of canvas design. But FlowChart is currently only an Activity component, and you can understand UiPath's positioning of it.
Shadow Knife RPA adopts a building block process construction application and uses "drag, pull, drag" to realize the construction of automated processes. A command represents an action, double-click or drag a command will pop up the instruction configuration interface, after the configuration will appear in the process orchestration area. Multiple instructions stacked together logically form an automated process application.
When designing a complex long process, some instructions can be combined into a sub-process to achieve relatively independent functions, and can be called by the main process or other sub-processes at any time, which can greatly facilitate the later process debugging.
Compared with UiPath's Sequence and FlowChart methods, the block process construction of Shadow Knife RPA makes the entire designer screen slightly fresher, and the visual feel of the complex process of logical branching is better.
But even so, shadow knife RPA, can only say low threshold, not "0 threshold", evaluate the shadow knife RPA products, from tutorial learning to get started to build RPA applications, at least 2 weeks, but the core is still in the learning and use of a variety of instructions, which is not experienced in the IT business side, has been very good.
Compared with Uipath, I feel that Shadow Knife RPA prefers to emphasize its own sense of "tool", that is, the company's own business personnel can find and solve problems on their own after learning the basic instructions of Shadow Knife RPA, for this piece, the author understands that Shadow Knife RPA's customer success team will specifically support e-commerce companies, help them cultivate "RPA process" special talents, and upgrade the overall talent structure of enterprises;
Shadow Knife RPA has more than 300,000 users to build applications in a year, more than half of which are business personnel, and it has accumulated more than 600 scene applications in the e-commerce industry so far, as well as nearly 10,000 head e-commerce customers.
Overall, shadow knife RPA is more like using the complex and changeable characteristics of the e-commerce industry to continuously polish its own products, and the ultimate goal is to target the desktop C-end office group with greater imagination space, it is not difficult to see why Coatue, as the majority shareholder of Uipath, wants to take the projection knife RPA in a high profile.
Finally, to quote Jiang Kai, head of Coatue China, this is the following:
"The global RPA market is undergoing a profound transformation from 're-implementation' to 'available to everyone'. One of the pain points of RPA is that IT departments cannot support the changing needs of business units at any time. Therefore, only by allowing front-line business personnel to quickly master RPA skills can we deploy RPA robots faster, better, and more. In the future, front-line business personnel will be the main battlefield for RPA vendors to compete.
The original intention of Shadow Knife RPA is to create an extremely simple, user-played product. We are optimistic about the ultimate pursuit of the product by the Shadow Knife team, and reduce the threshold for product use while continuously strengthening the product function. We believe that Shadow Knife RPA has the opportunity to become a highly competitive human-machine collaborative desktop efficiency product in the global market. ”