Today, UIPath announced that it is to acquire UK-based Re:Infer, and quite frankly, it’s one of the most interesting deals of recent few years. Deep Analysis came across Re:Infer late in 2021 and subsequently met with and wrote about them earlier this year, and in that report stated that it would be a good acquisition candidate.
Technology that automates repetitive tasks and cost-cutting go hand in hand, so with a looming recession, it’s logical to expect RPA tools to do well. Overall, they are doing well, but in recent conversations with buyers, systems integrators, and resellers, things are not going as well as they should be.
It’s been quite a busy month in Information Management & Automation, our home, out there on the edge of the technology sector. Despite doom and gloom in the economy and geopolitical unrest, a sharp decline in IPO’s plenty of deals big and small are still active in our corner of the world. Below is a …
Info Management & Automation M&A Roundup May-June 2022 Read More »
Last week one press release made a claim that almost broke our skeptimeter. The headline claimed “industry-first 100% accuracy offering for document processing.”
If you want evidence of where things are going, French search giant Sinequa this week announced the launch of not one but four pre-trained deep learning language models for its platform. Four, not one – that is a vast amount of AI processing power.
At Deep Analysis, we undertake technical and market due diligence for Private Equity, Investment Banks, and Vendors looking to acquire. Hence we keep a close eye on what is happening in the broader Information Management and Enterprise Automation market. May, except for the massive Kofax deal (our analysis here), has been relatively quiet, but a few deals this month did catch our attention….
This was a bullish briefing from Blue Prism. SS&C paid $1.65 billion, so we expected nothing less than a moon shot effort. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding, as a lot of product integration promises were made and there is still much work to do here. It’s also hard to imagine that this is the last acquisition SS&C will make. Will the portfolio grow even further with a process intelligence/mining addition on the horizon?
So to nobody’s surprise, Kofax’s owners, Thoma Bravo, announced that it had sold the company to Clearlake Capital and TA Associates this past week. At the time, the asking price was circa $3B, and something a little north of that seems to have been the final sale price.
But beyond the expected announcements, Appian World was an interesting reflection on the pandemic years and its impact on IT and IT vendors. For Appian, this period has delivered a rocket-sized boost to their business growing around 20% year on year.
This week, Microsoft made an interesting announcement – launching Microsoft Purview, bringing ‘almost’ all its Information Governance products under a single banner, and theoretically at least, into a single home.
Microsoft recently acquired the processing mining vendor Minit. We looked closely at Minit a little while back, and you can read our report on the company and its technology here. In our estimation, this is one of the best small acquisitions Microsoft has made in quite some time.
IDP (AI-powered document capture/OCR) is about to cross the venerable chasm and enter the main street of B2B purchasing. And the charge is being led not by the legacy IDP vendors, but by the upstarts.
TWAIN Direct’s ultimate goal is connecting devices directly to the software app, completely removing the PC from the middle. That’s really important to the new wave of cloud developers; it abstracts the proprietary hardware layer and replaces all the other confusing scanner connectors. Plus it’s free to any developer.
Ignite was a vast digital event befitting of the newly-crowned world’s most valuable public company, with a dizzying array of product announcements rolled out around the main theme of making hybrid work the new normal. Here are some very brief highlights…
Does the Zillow algorithm fail have larger meaning for AI? Some tech pundits have used this story to rail against the blind adoption of AI by businesses or to preach against the sins of replacing human wisdom with AI bots. After reading a few posts, you’d be forgiven for thinking this could be the beginning of the end for evil AI. At Deep Analysis, we thoroughly disagree with the fearmongers and naysayers.
Rossum, a cognitive capture software startup out of the Czech Republic, just closed a remarkable Series A round of $100 million to ramp up what it’s calling a cloud-based universal document gateway. To our knowledge this is the largest single investment ever into a capture software startup.
Today there was important news in the Cognitive Capture market. ABBYY, a privately-held company, announced an investment from Marlin Equity Partners, which will make Marlin the largest shareholder. Terms of the investment were not revealed. Marlin is a global private equity firm that acquires businesses across diverse industries and has built a significant portfolio of software companies.
We attended OpenText World Europe this April to learn where the ship is headed. OpenText made it very clear that it is staking its content management future on the cloud. The company announced Cloud Editions 21.2, an all-encompassing, all-in effort to achieve that long turn away from on-premise legacy software. Mark Barranchea, CEO, pledged an R&D investment of over $1 billion in R&D in their diverse stable of products. For a company with $3 billion in sales last year, that is a very impressive number.
Under the hood, Vantage utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that are pre-trained on hundreds of thousands of documents to extract visual features from a document. A Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is used to extract semantic features of the text. While undoubtedly welcome to the large community of ABBYY users and the market at large, neither method is ground-breaking or particularly innovative.
