Shares in AI specialist Blue Prism surge after revenue jumps
Shares in Blue Prism, a London-based robotic automation specialist, jumped over 20 per cent today after the company reported an 83 per cent increase in revenue.
Blue Prism’s revenue for the 12 months ending 31 October rose to £101m, up from £55.2m in 2019, with monthly recurring revenue (MRR) coming in ahead of expectations.
The AIM-listed firm helped pioneer robotic process automation (RPA), and sells software which allows companies to shift repetitive tasks to robots — which it calls digital workers — to complete.
MRR at the company, which gained customers including Amazon, the International Monetary Fund and the US justice department during the year, rose from £6.2m to £10.6m.
Blue Prism shares were trading as much as 21.63 per cent up by lunchtime. The company’s market capitalisation — which currently stands at just under £1bn — is up around seven per cent compared to this time last year.
Speaking to City PM, executive chairman Jason Kingdon said the results were a “great performance”.
“The brand value of those organisations that are adopting our product and wanting to adopt it at scale is a massive validation,” he added.
“These guys don’t buy technology lightly…The value that they see is that if you automate something, that’s a return to the business. It’s about a piece of technology actually doing work for you, so it’s very easy to understand what the commercial impact on your organisation is.”
Blue Prism’s customer base jumped almost 73 per cent from 971 in 2018 to 1,677 last year, with 1,139 upsells into 544 clients.
Blue Prism reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of £71.9m for the year, up from £21.6m in 2018, with the acquisition of cloud-based AI firm Thoughtonomy in July, which has now been integrated into Blue Prism.
Kingdon said Blue Prism had also been focusing on “shoring up and growing our business in line with this level of business we’re now supporting around the world”.
In today’s results, Blue Prism said it expects a reduction in cash burn from the first half of this year, and plans to be “broadly cash neutral” in the second half.