Vista acquires UK automation firm Blue Prism for £1.1bn, will merge with Tibco

Blue Prism's shares have been on a downward trajectory

Blue Prism has agreed to a takeover by US private equity firm Vista for £1.1 billion ($1.5 billion) in cash.

Once the acquisition is completed, Vista says it plans to amalgamate Blue Prism with enterprise data management firm Tibco, which it bought in 2014.

Founded in 2003, Blue Prism is best known as one of the originators of robotic process automation (RPA) along with rivals UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

However, its market valuation is significantly below that of its rivals. UiPath is valued at $28 billion while Automation Anywhere was valued at of $6.8 billion in 2019. The low valuation caused shares in the company to fall by 3 per cent when the Vista deal was announced on Tuesday.

In recent times, Warrington-based Blue Prism has run into financial problems, leading to the departure of founder and then-CEO Alastair Bathgate as the company set about raising £100 million on the financial markets in a stock sale in April 2020. This year, Blue Prism has seen the value of its shares drop by a third because of worries that it was falling behind its competitors. The company says it has more than 2,000 enterprise customers; it has offices in Texas and Sydney.

Commenting on the acquisition, Blue Prism chairman and CEO Jason Kingdon said: "Combining with Vista and Tibco will ensure we remain at the forefront of the next generation of intelligent automation. We can expand the range of products we offer our customers with Tibco's global footprint and technologies, and as a privately owned company we will also have greater access to capital to pursue new growth opportunities via product investment and other potential M&A."

Matt Quinn, COO at Tibco, said: "Blue Prism's RPA solutions present an attractive opportunity to expand our product offering and enable our customers to further benefit from intelligent automation as part of the Tibco Connected Intelligence platform. Together, Blue Prism and Tibco have the opportunity to provide our customers and partners with access to a complementary set of hyperautomation capabilities with a proven track record of breakthrough innovation."

Last year, Tibco acquired BI firm Information Builders.

In a sign that the days of pure play RPA vendors may be numbered, another RPA firm, Servicetrace, was acquired in August by Salesforce which plans to merge it with API platform MuleSoft.

The Blue Prism deal is the latest of a string of tech acquisitions of UK tech companies by foreign investors. In February, the Japanese firm Renasas bought Dialog Semiconductor, and China's Tencent acquired games developer Sumo Group in July.