UiPath, The Automation King Is Back!
$PATH, company overview and valuation.
“The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble. ... We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.”
-Warren Buffett
UiPath, The Automation King Is Back!
It took me a while to truly understand UiPath. On my first pass, it looked like a typical software-legacy story: a company that grew too fast for its own good, hit reality, and was now being made obsolete by a new technological paradigm. A company that, despite spectacular early execution, a 40% CAGR from 2020 to 2024, had somehow lost its edge.
The narrative seemed bleak: a fallen star drifting from its post-IPO highs of $85 in 2021 to trading between $9 and $15 for the past 18 months.
My initial impression was simple:
UiPath had become the king of an old, outdated technology, “Robotic Process Automation” and its reign had abruptly ended the moment agentic AI walked onto the stage.
AI agents looked like a superior species arriving to replace the previous dominant but inferior one. With bigger companies entering the agentic AI space, I assumed UiPath’s brief dominance belonged to the past. The future seemed limited to either a miraculous turnaround or a slow and painful fade-out, especially for remaining shareholders, since much of the value the company created had been diluted away through high SBC.
I was wrong.
Spectacularly wrong.
Yes, UiPath faced real turbulence:
Some restructuring initiatives
A cultural identity crisis
The founder and CEO, Daniel Dines, stepping down and then returning
A period of bloated spending and misalignment
But the business is, and has always been, far from dead.
UiPath today is growing revenue at over 15.9%, and is expected to reaccelerate thanks to its newest agentic AI and orchestration offerings, capabilities that don’t replace RPA, but actually complete it.
RPA Isn’t Dead
For a while, I thought UiPath’s turnaround depended almost exclusively on adopting LLMs, that LLMs were the miracle that arrived just in time to save them, and that RPA was a relic of the past.
Now I see clearly:
RPA is alive, healthy, expanding, and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. It’s simply a technology that addresses a different part of the workflow.
And LLMs don’t kill RPA, they take it to its logical next evolution.
UiPath is a company that had an accident, ended up on the operating table, but had everything it needed to survive and thrive.
The market is deeply discounting UiPath, but you shouldn’t.
At this point, I believe UiPath is one of the most asymmetric opportunities I’ve found. Possibly as asymmetric as when I built my IREN position between $5 and $10 earlier this year.
Understanding UiPath’s Core Offering
UiPath’s foundational product is RPA, Robotic Process Automation.
At its core, RPA is simply software designed to automate repetitive, rule-based tasks.
The distinction is key:
RPA
Deterministic
Rule-based
Always produces the same result
Interacts with digital systems exactly like a human would
But does not understand semantic context
RPA is dumb, repetitive, but efficient, fast, cheap, and reliable.
AI Agents
Understand context and meaning
Can use tools, reason, plan, and escalate
Are non-deterministic
Powerful, flexible, but inherently less predictable
In the words of Evan Cohen, Director of Product at UiPath:
“Robots do. Agents think. Humans lead.”
And that’s the key.
UiPath is the company that figured out how to combine all three: robots, agents, and humans, into a single, coherent operating model.
Maestro: The Missing Piece of Enterprise AI
UiPath’s agentic orchestration platform, “Maestro” is the control plane that coordinates robots, agents, humans, and data across entire business workflows.
It is the missing layer in making agentic AI production-ready for the enterprise.
It transforms LLM-powered agents from experimental tools into governed, auditable, reproducible units of work, something enterprises desperately need.
With UiPath:
Businesses can design workflows that synergize robots + AI agents + human oversight
Deploy AI in a safe, governed, rule-based framework
Measure, track, and guarantee outcomes
Integrate directly with platforms like Microsoft Copilot, CrewAI, LangChain, and many others
It is the future of converging human and digital workforces.
UiPath Used to Automate With Its Hands Tied Behind Its Back
UiPath was wildly successful in business automation long before LLMs.
Gartner named them a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for RPA for seven consecutive years (including 2025).
But in hindsight, it’s clear:
Before LLMs, UiPath was trying to automate global enterprises with both hands tied behind its back.
AI is the unlock, the missing capability that allows RPA to transcend rules and take on unstructured work.
This evolution has reinvigorated the company.
The internal tone has shifted from survival mode to opportunity mode, and you can feel it across Dines’ recent interviews and quarterly results calls. UiPath has rediscovered direction, discipline, and urgency.
Valuation: The Growth Question
For my valuation, the central question is growth.
Yes, UiPath faces competition.
Yes, other players have agentic AI platforms.
And yes, Palantir arguably has an early lead in certain enterprise AI orchestration use cases.
But the automation market is expanding rapidly, and UiPath is:
Serving nearly 11,000 enterprise customers worldwide
Already generating $1.5B in annual revenue
Holding a healthy 83% gross margin
Entering a new product cycle with agentic AI
Sitting on a strong balance sheet
Running a more disciplined operating model post-restructuring
When modeling scenarios, I tried:
1. UiPath beats the market, possible, but uncertain
2. UiPath loses market share, extremely unlikely given their broad client base and deep understanding of enterprise processes.
3. UiPath grows with the market, most realistic
Market growth expectations across the best research I found are:
22% to 43% annual growth for the next 5–10 years
RPA is expanding
AI in automation is exploding
Enterprise orchestration demand is accelerating
Sources:
https://grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/robotic-process-automation-rpa-market
https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/08/18/3135131/0/en/Robotic-Process-Automation-Market-Size-to-Hit-USD-211-06-Billion-by-2034-Driving-Enterprise-Efficiency-and-Cost-Savings-Through-Automation.html
https://mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/robotic-process-automation-market?
https://technavio.com/report/ai-in-rpa-market-industry-analysis?
https://market.us/report/intelligent-automation-market/#
Given these ranges, I selected 23.6% (from http://market.us) as my long-term growth assumption.
Expense Discipline & Operating Leverage.
After watching several interviews with Daniel Dines and reviewing the company’s restructuring history, it’s clear the leadership team has learned painful, but valuable, lessons:
Growth must be paced
Spending must be disciplined
Culture must be aligned
Product must stay ahead of the market
This supports projecting a net margin of 30% before 2030 and 40% by 2035.
My assumptions for the following metrics are:
• Share buyback impact: 1%
• P/E multiple: 25×
• Discount rate: 10% (my standard hurdle rate; allocation is driven by margin of safety and conviction)
• Model horizon: 10 years
Resulting intrinsic value:
$81.46 per share
I also ran a stress-test scenario with just 10% growth, well below market expectations, as a “floor” case.
Even then:
$28.58 per share
The conclusion is obvious:
$PATH Is a True Asymmetric Opportunity
Trading currently at only $19.04
The downside is limited.
The upside is massive.
The business is misunderstood, discounted, and entering a new capability wave just as enterprise AI adoption is beginning to inflect.
I’ve initiated a position and plan to add more over the coming months.
Remember to always do your own research. This write-up is an oversimplification; I didn’t really cover everything necessary to make a good investment decision, but I hope it serves as a good start. If you want to dive deeper, definitely check this post out: https://x.com/jakebrowatzke/status/1990253585649533373?s=46&t=n6nb9-cG0yPD_84M3dceIA and follow @jakebrowatzke
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