Blue Prism has announced that it has raised £100 million in funding from existing and new investors, placing it in a strong position in the current economic climate.
The Blue Prism funding will be used to further strengthen and protect the RPA company’s balance sheet during a period of uncertainty for the wider economy, while allowing continued investment in the innovation of its dedicated enterprise intelligent automation suite.
The funding raised positions the business as a stronger partner to its large enterprise customer base, who are looking to accelerate RPA adoption to maintain business continuity and alleviate the challenges of Covid-19 through intelligent automation.
“In this environment, our digital workers are arguably more important than ever in driving organisational adaptation and resilience, and our role as a strategic technology partner to our customers in many ways becomes more emphasised,” says Jason Kingdon, executive chairman and CEO of Blue Prism, following Alistair Bathgate’s departure.
“The capital raised positions us a strong partner to our enterprise customers as they increasingly look to securely scale beyond a simple proof-of-concept (PoC) while leveraging leading-edge AI and cognitive capabilities.”
How Blue Prism’s digital workers are helping the fight against Covid-19
A business priority
In this new economic reality caused by coronavirus, automation has become a top business priority.
Blue Prism, like the other RPA market leaders, is working to meet this demand by helping organisations stay resilient, responsive and competitive through the deployment of a digital workforce.
Digital workforce in action
Blue Prism’s COVID-19 Response Program is helping organisations maintain business continuity and assisting those on the front lines of the health emergency.
The realities of the disruption caused by the coronavirus has seen a need for a digital workforce, who can automate mission critical tasks across different sectors.
Blue Prism’s COVID-19 Response Program includes the following real-world customer examples.
1. Managing mortgage deferral applications
Leeds Building Society: One of the leading building societies in the United Kingdom, this organisation enjoys a long history of helping people save money so they can buy their own home. Building societies have been identified as essential service providers during the Covid-19 crisis as they will be responding to service customers that need to trigger a government-approved mortgage holiday due to job loss or businesses closing.
Anticipating a huge uptick in mortgage deferral requests, this Blue Prism customer needed to quickly expand its existing RPA process capacity. The mortgage deferral requests received by the call center are supported by Blue Prism Digital Workers to speed the process and improve customer experience.
“The additional Digital Workers are now live — the new mortgage payment holiday requests have exceeded 2,000 a day and this is all now being handled by our RPA solution,” explains Kevin Mowles, head of business solutions for Leeds Building Society.
“Our call centre was facing unprecedented demand and answer times increased as a result. Once our web form with the new RPA capacity went live; calls have been reduced by 75% and speed of answer was cut to 21 seconds. The whole process is fully automated, so a better service for customers, breathing space for front line colleagues and the back-office processing teams. Prompt support has been invaluable.”
Blue Prism’s executive chairman discusses the rise of RPA
2. Accelerating vaccine development
University of California San Francisco (UCSF): UCSF is the world’s leading university exclusively focused on health.
Professor Bill DeGrado, the founder and principal investigator at the UCSF DeGrado Lab, explores new techniques in the computationally complex problem of de novo protein design, a vital tool to craft new vaccines and therapeutics for pathogens. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the DeGrado Lab has broadened their focus to designing prophylactics, vaccines and therapeutics to help manage the SARS CoV-2 virus, the cause of COVID-19.
An extremely computer-intensive process, de novo protein design entails coming up with the right primary sequence of amino acids that will fold into the correct three-dimensional conformation that can attach to the virus to neutralise its abilities to infect. The lab is exploring how Blue Prism’s digital workers can be used to speed up the movement of data between applications, which is a slow manual process today.
The digital workers would provide the ability to create new and flexible automation pathways that allow computer-based apps to run in different sequences — it allows digital workers to transform, sort, and categorise data using various AI techniques, which should result in a shorter time to design these life-saving molecules.
