Automation Anywhere seeks to expand global presence with recent funding

Automation Anywhere appoints former E&Y partner Milan Sheth to strengthen presence in IMEA

Robotic process automation (RPA) company Automation Anywhere on Thursday announced the appointment of former E&Y partner Milan Sheth as the executive vice president for India, Middle East, and Africa (IMEA) region. 

The company had recently raised $300 million from SoftBank Vision Fund at a valuation of $2.6 billion and it expects to double the number of offices globally to 40 by March in 2019.

Apart from building the team, Milan Sheth will lead the company through its next phase of growth. Sheth has over 18 years of experience with Ernst & Young (EY) where he served as its senior partner and national director for the technology business. In this role, he worked closely with Automation Anywhere.

"We are excited to introduce Milan as our dedicated regional head in IMEA. With more enterprises in the region demanding improved ways to automate business processes, India has a huge opportunity to become the global hub of business process automation," said Ankur Kothari, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Automation Anywhere.

Almost 90 per cent of Automation Anywhere’s India business comes from global innovation centres (GICs) of MNCs and through service providers like TCS who use their technology. “We are lately seeing a lot of interest from the public sector in India as well as in tier-II cities where corporations are seeking to automate their front and back office operations," said Sheth.

Automation Anywhere counts companies like Juniper, Unilever, ANZ, Tesco, Dell, Google, Cisco, LinkedIn, apart from system integration (SI) partners, as its top clients in the region. With this recent development, the company aims to increase the count of its global partners from 325 to 2,000.

“While less than 15 per cent business originates in India almost 30 per cent of our business is processed through GICs here and even more is done through our partners. By March we will expand across even more geographies and plan to have around 50 offices (currently around 23 offices across 15 countries) across 40 countries," said Kothari.

He also added that while the overall business has been growing at almost 150 per cent, the India business itself has grown in leaps and bounds with large-scale RPA adoption resulting in over 200 per cent year-on-year (YoY) growth.

Founded by four Indians — Ankur Kothari, Neeti Mehta Shukla, Mihir Shukla, Rushabh Parmani — in 2003, California-headquartered Automation Anywhere has a presence in Vadodara, Bengaluru, and Mumbai where most of its development and delivery teams are located.