Blue Prism launches venture fund to expand global use of cloud RPA

Last April, robotic process automation firm Blue Prism bolstered its own balance sheet with a $124 million financing round, enabling the maker of enterprise-class software robots to expand its suite of AI agents and dashboards. Now the company is launching a venture fund to bring RPA technologies to new clients, starting with the Asia-Pacific region before expanding to “the entire globe.”

Blue Prism Ventures is designed to give companies with little or no RPA experience the strategic and technical wherewithal to deploy AI software agents, beginning with the development of intelligent automation business plans, then the Blue Prism tools necessary to execute those plans. The firm’s first venture is Blue Vision Korea, a partnership between Blue Vision and tech firm GTPlus, which will give South Korean customers access to three key elements: a drag-and-drop Design Studio to create custom software process automations, a Digital Workforce of software robots that use AI to learn and imitate business processes, and a Control Room to assign and oversee software agent automations.

The launch of Blue Prism Ventures is significant for technical decision makers because it demonstrates how deeply software robotic process automation firms are willing to work with potential clients to win business this year, thereby accelerating the AI technology’s spread across the world. While RPA can clearly enhance business efficiency, removing the need for humans to perform rote app tasks — or leveraging armies of AI agents to process data in ways individual human operators couldn’t imagine — it’s increasingly obvious that many legacy companies require either hand holding or incentives to begin the transformative journey. Venture-level support will likely reduce initial onboarding friction and ultimately yield upside for both clients and Blue Prism.

Blue Prism’s technology promises to automate nearly any app on any platform, including everything from PCs to web browsers and cloud systems; this week, Blue Prism expanded its footprint in the cloud by adding Bring Your Own License support for Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace and AppSource. Cognitive services such as Azure Computer Vision, Form Recognizer, and Text Analytics are included in the new offering, enabling Blue Prism users to directly license the services they need from Microsoft, while benefiting from already-developed Blue Prism AI accelerators. Blue Prism users can access over 175 Microsoft product-specific enterprise automation accelerators, including ones specific to Healthcare Cloud, Power Automate, and Power Platform.

Based in London with a major office in Austin, Texas, Blue Prism has been operating since 2001 and publicly traded since 2016. The company now boasts around 2,000 customers globally — the majority “early in their RPA journey” — and supplies digital workers to Accenture, DuPont, Google, IBM, Jaguar/Land Rover, KPMG, and Microsoft, among other major companies.