UiPath Inc S-1 SEC Form | Hacker News Reader

UiPath Inc S-1 SEC Form

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54 pointsvladd56 comments

UiPath vs. Automation Anywhere was a hotly contested debate amongst the growth investor set for the last 3-5 years but the massive distance UiPath has put between it and AA in the last 12-15 months is remarkable.

Dubious on the very long-term value of the company as SaaS providers continue to eat away at some of its core use cases in banking / financial services, and both large RPA vendors have had some disastrous deployments outside of their core industries but there's so much value in replacing massive BPO spend in financial and professional services oriented enterprises. This one's a winner in the near to mid-term at the very least.

If you have to buy bots like this you are already fucked. Your workforce is already spending enormous amounts of time doing simple processes or data entry.

Welcome to public audit, buddy. Every publicly listed firm has an audit team assigned and they UiP the ____ out of everything and anything your publicly traded investment throws at them.

Exactly

Or they’re using legacy software that will forever be crystalized under a flimsy layer of UiPath automation. Lots of large institutions in this market hence the large market capitalization. If things weren’t complicated enough now they will see a lot more spaghetti infrastucture and this is not a turnkey solution, this needs an initial setup and a lot of maintenance as well

I know it's registered in the US, but still: go Romania! :-)

Hai Romanii!!!! :D

literally dozens of us!

I've worked with Romanian devs a bunch around Cluj and had really good experiences. I'm assuming the talent pool isn't huge but seems very high quality.

Well, as everywhere in the world, it varies. Plus a lot of people have left/are leaving Romania, but even so, for a rather poor country of now around 18 million people (used to be ~23 million in 1990), I think there are around 100k software developers). Which is not too shabby considering where we started (I guess in 1990 we had maybe 5k).

Cluj is growing but it's still a bit of secondary center. Bucharest on the other hand has offices from almost every major player, I think only Facebook, Apple and Netflix are the only ones missing for now (that might change, as things are moving super fast these days). Otherwise, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Google, Intel, Huawei, Adobe, SAP, etc. are there.

It's my goal to save up more cash and then at some point in the near future move to Romania to try my hand at a startup there. Any recommendations on who to talk with or what kinds of resources I should read? Should a startup be incorporated in America still, or do the Romania tech tax-benefits only apply to companies incorporated in Romania? Questions like these are accumulating on my list now that I'm starting to see this goal becoming a reality! Any recommendations or advice would be appreciated.

I can't say that I have much advice for this, but if you're serious about this, it's probably a good idea to contact a lawyer, maybe try this: https://www.stratulat-albulescu.ro/en/contact/ I imagine a few hours of discussions won't cost you an arm and a leg and you should be able to get far more qualified advice than what you'd get from a rando on the internet.

If you do want to move, personally I would avoid Bucharest... a bit. Competition is super fierce. Timișoara, Cluj or Iași, especially Iași, should have a decent talent pool and slightly lower salary expenses/lower cost of living, and they all have international airports so you can easily move around when needed.

I'd learn a bit of Romanian. If you only speak English it will be relatively hard, but reasonably doable: https://www.openculture.com/2017/11/a-map-showing-how-much-t... (note: those numbers are for career diplomats undergoing intensive training, however, as you can see, it's still one of the easiest languages to crack for an English speaker :-) ).

Thanks for the advice! I really appreciate it. I'm pretty fluent in Romanian, at least by American standards. Grew up bilingual because we were always more embedded in the Romanian community around town. :) But I will definitely seek to improve massively so I sound exactly like a native speaker!

Good luck! You'll need it (both because a startup is a risky business, and also because Romania still has a long way to become fully business friendly and well... developed). On the other hand: no risk, no reward.

And each of us can be a Daniel Dines if we ever decide to save up our American capital and go back to start more companies. :)

Well, it wouldn't hurt if at some point we finally have, you know... Romanian capital :-)

What is it going to take to get there?

More successful Romanian owned businesses, especially international ones plus, I think, better EU funds use. EU funds are not exactly Romanian funding but are earmarked for Romanian development so they're not far off, and we're super bad at utilizing them fully.

100%, I like how you think <3 :)

someone slap un lup dacic on that S1 imediat!

Romanian devs are quality devs! Go Romania!

I work in this space. That this is considered a subset of "AI" is the biggest magic trick these RPA companies have pulled off. The worst part is that they prey on the Business side of the corporate world by peddling of these as "Low-code" platforms where a business team can just "build bots". It is never. the case. Never.

I did some work with this during the peak pandemic times to help automate workflows on legacy systems. It is bullshit that they sell the bots so hard but things like attended bots make it easier to train people or modernize front ends.

A lot of times the cost of rewriting a big nasty mainframe app is too expensive. Cheaper to offshore those operations and put an api in front of it. Nobody wants to be the next headline for fubaring the DMV rewrite.

End of the day, UiPath will end up part of some necrotic software collector firm like MicroFocus or OpenText.

"Business results are achieved by exploiting opportunity NOT by solving problems" :) -- Peter Drucker

But every opportunity is unsolved problem.

I've spent a lot of time in consulting and have been in and out of many giant enterprises. I've seen all the slick sales nonsense from Salesforce, Adobe, IBM, Tata etc. I've never once heard UIPath even be mentioned. Who are they selling to?

Any large to medium sized company with a backoffice cost-center, like a company that does X but has a huge finance department that needs to provide for it.

Any reason this is on sec.report (a standalone company) rather than sec.gov like almost every other S-1 post? https://hn.algolia.com/?q=sec.gov+s-1

The formatting is actually better on sec.gov

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1734722/000119312521...

This has happened before, more recently with Sumo Logic's S-1 and HN changed the post link to sec.gov which IMO is what should happen with this post too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263217

If not, here's a new submission with the authoritative sec.gov source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26608517

It's often the case that sec.report has better SEO than the official EDGAR website. Which is a shame in that it can be quite challenging to mechanistically download data from sec.report. In short, you can always get what you need from EDGAR, and also spider that site with ease (so long as you are not abusive).

sec.report does provide value to the user for sure. Just not the one who is interested in data extraction.

sec.report is just a third-party frontend, if you will, to SEC filings. Anyone can download all the SEC filings, so several companies have been built around providing better access, such as improved search, than sec.gov has.

I don't know why OP didn't submit the sec.gov link though.

Email notification perhaps

I find it crazy that something do seemingly inefficient and fragile is promoted as amazing. Are you really going to have a bunch of windows servers with software clicking buttons, hoping it doesn't suddenly click the wrong thing and mess everything up.

Does anyone know how to effectively read such a long form / document? What are the most important pieces of information for a layperson and where / how to find them?

> Does anyone know how to effectively read such a long form / document?

I skim the prospectus summary before skipping to the financials (index to consolidated financials) and the notes below them. (The notes are where red flags are hidden.) I then skim the description of capital stock, principal and selling stockholders and related party transactions for scumminess.

Finally, if nothing there looks off-putting, the MD&A. (If management is screwy, the MD&A is easier to manipulate than the above sections.)

Business Section and MD&A are the only parts worth reading.

Business section will go over the history of the company, the product, high level strategy etc. MD&A will include all of the financials and provide some commentary

It depends on what you want to get out of it. Are you looking to learn about the business/market, or are you also interested in potentially investing? The S-1 has information on the financials, the stock being offered, the company's capitalization, their business, the market/industry, etc.

At the front of every S-1 is the "Prospectus Summary" [1], which is easily identified as it has a black border around it. It's a condensed version of the rest of the filing, so (a) it may have some parts that don't interest you, and (b) it repeats information that is explained more fully in other sections.

My recommendation is to check out the Table of Contents [2] and click on a few of the sections that stick out to you. Every S-1 follows the same format [3], so if you skim through one of them you'll get a good idea of what will be in others and what you care about.

When I'm primarily interested in learning about the business (i.e., not making an investment), I head straight to the Business section [4].

The MD&A [5] is also great. You'll learn additional things about the business, but it will be mixed in with financial data. A lot of that detail might not be important to you. For instance, there are sections of the MD&A that discuss non-GAAP financial metrics (i.e., financial metrics that are not standardized by the SEC) or the company's liquidity. The headings within the MD&A help a lot.

The Risk Factors [6] can be interesting, but there's a lot of boiler plate info. Skim it and look for things that seem specific to the company. For instance, there's one that says, "The markets in which we participate are competitive..." and it lists companies they see as their competition. A couple pages later is one that says, "We target enterprise customers..." and has some details on customer size and concentration. But then there is one that says, "If we fail to retain and motivate members of our management team or other key employees, or fail to attract additional qualified personnel to support our operations, our business and future growth prospects would be harmed." There are some specifics about the company and the market they are in, but it's also kind of obvious and in there so that a shareholder can't sue them later and say, "We didn't know this was a risk!"

I hope this helps some. It's a bit daunting to see so many pages with so much information. Happy to answer other questions you have. I took a few companies public as an investment banker, then invested in equities at a hedge fund, and also have a PhD in capital markets and disclosure.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1734722/000119312521...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1734722/000119312521...

[3] https://www.sec.gov/files/forms-1.pdf

[4] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1734722/000119312521...

[5] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1734722/000119312521...

[6] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1734722/000119312521...

Thank you for such a thorough answer. Much appreciated.

What are you looking for?

Here's a teardown of the UiPath S1 of the business metrics, product/market, competition, etc: https://blog.publiccomps.com/ui-path-s-1-ipo-teardown/

On one hand, this type of service merely solves business intent with unfriendly or un-automatable interfaces. Why should this exist and be so successful? On the other, I guess it's like Segment or Tray.io, gluing together various services to improve business outcomes, and taking their slice of the efficiency improvements they make possible. I guess the most commonly integrated services should wake up and see the potential revenue they're losing in having crumby interfaces, and in the meantime UIPath will provide a good path for efficient IT services. Fair play to them in executing so well in this space.

> Net losses fell from $519.9 million in 2020 to $92.3 million in 2021.

It's amazing how tolerant the capital markets are of purchasing revenues.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/26/uipath-files-s-1-for-ipo.htm...

RPA solutions seem very fragile (akin to the web scraper space), but if the folks maintaining these low code solutions are cheap, then product will be around for a while as a sort new fangled, easy to deploy, CGI.

I haven't worked with uipsth directly but have some experience with similar automation tools. They are the worst and if needed it's a pretty bad sign.

Part of the reason UiPath is doing so well is because it raised the bar when compared to its competitors from 'the worst' to 'usable'. Blue Prism is alright, but they're so closed off and proprietary it gets in the way of actually solving the problem. AA is just, as you say, 'the worst'.

I'm not the biggest fan of RPA but it definitely has a use case. Though my hunch is that UiPath is going to be something like the Slack of RPA soon if there isn't any progress in the anti-trust front.

Microsoft is starting a big push with Flow/PowerAutomate, and Microsoft _owns_ the legacy corporate environment where RPA finds all its customers. RPA makes money charging expensive licenses per 'bot', and MS just gave 1000 free licenses of power automate to MS 365 customers (at least, the small NPO I just migrated got them). Good luck to UiPaths sales team going forward.

I do not understand what they actually do. I thought they made robots for a very long time.

Business process automation. I would be cautious on IPO however.

Like Zapier?

More like a mix of Lego Mindstorms and the macro software you get from gaming mice

They remind me of Oracle but RPA can't be as big as databases anytime soon.

I find it crazy they were able to go from 1m to 100m in ARR in 18 months

That doesn't sound right, where are you seeing that

It took them 13 years to get from $0 to $50m of ARR..

I believe it was 13 years to get from $0 to 1m in ARR? Am I mistaken?

All the big consultancies are pushing RPA, bots, automation etc HARd the last year in bigCo land. I think part of it is due to the wfh pandemic situation.

I’d wait 6 months or so, the bottom could fall out of this category fairly quick.

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