UiPath has been busy this week; the robot process automation (RPA) software company today filed its Initial Public Offering (IPO) prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and also announced its March 19 acquisition of API integration platform Cloud Elements for $40.5 million, a move that will give UiPath more integration and support additional automation capabilities.

“To maximize benefits from automation, companies often require both a UI- and API-based approach, and today’s acquisition accelerates UiPath’s ability to offer comprehensive API-based automation to its customers,” company spokesperson Amanda Maguire said Wednesday.

RPA is great at mimicking human workers, which is effective for automation in situations that APIs aren’t provided or are difficult to access, said Neil Ward-Dutton, a vice president of intelligent business execution practice for IDC, a global market intelligence research company. This effectiveness is partly why RPA adoption has been so business-driven, he added. More complex integrations require APIs, which are more secure, stable, and perform better than a user interface, Ward-Dutton explained.

The Denver-based Cloud Elements, on the other hand, provides an API integration platform to manage digital products and applications. Founded in 2012, the company had raised a total of $46.6 million before being purchased, according to Crunchbase. Having the collection of pre-built connectors in Cloud Elements will mean “UiPath can help automate more use cases more quickly, and also in many cases drive automations that perform better and are more scalable and secure,” he added.

API integration has been a weak point for RPA providers in the past, which became painfully clear during the first round of the federal Payroll Protection Program (PPP). Banks that automated PPP applications using bots suddenly found themselves shut down by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), which was overwhelmed by applications filed by bots. Meanwhile, banks using APIs to submit applications were still able to have them processed.

The Cloud Elements deal, coming just as UiPath plans to go public, brings more than 200 new native integrations to UiPath and enables new capabilities, including the ability to trigger an automation based on the occurrence of an event. It makes native integrations available at every stage of the automation lifecycle through the API library, UiPath said. The platform also incorporates some governance capabilities for API-based automation, such as ensuring standard practices around APIs can be implemented and enforced, according to Maguire.

The New York-based UiPath, which was founded in 2005, has raised $2 billion in eight funding rounds, according to Crunchbase; the number includes its most recent $750 million round, which valued the automation software maker at $35 billion. The company is a leading RPA vendor, according to both Forrester’s Wave and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, which both rank vendors along four axes. Leading competitors include Automation Anywhere, WorkFusion, Microsoft’s PowerAutomate, Kryon and Blue Prism.

UiPath said this week’s acquisition will make it the “first provider to offer both enterprise-grade UI and API-based automation capabilities in a single platform.” However, Forrester’s March 15 Wave report on RPA vendors noted that Microsoft’s Power Automate also “brings together UI- and API-based automation with AI,” and SAP’s Intelligent RPA can also leverage APIs from its SAP API Business Hub. Pegasystems is another vendor that offers API- and UI-based integration, according to Ward-Dutton.

But UiPath’s most direct competitors in this space are further behind, Ward-Dutton cautioned.

From a labor-centric point of view, “UiPath has a range of complementary capabilities that are also pretty deep and rich,” Ward-Dutton said. The company is therefore able to “take automation from being a tactical tool to address individual pain points, and turn it into something that can be pursued more strategically.”

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