Down 55% From Its High, Is UiPath Stock a Smart Buy?

UiPath (PATH 0.75%) is on a mission to fully automate the enterprise. To that end, its software platform helps clients build AI-powered bots capable of augmenting a human workforce by automating a variety of business processes. Since going public in April 2021, UiPath's share price has plunged as macroeconomic headwinds have sparked a sell-off in richly valued growth stocks, especially those of the unprofitable persuasion. To that end, UiPath stock currently trades 55% below its all-time high.

In this Backstage Pass video, recorded on Jan. 4, Motley Fool contributor Trevor Jennewine explains why investors shouldn't give up on this tech company.

Trevor Jennewine: If you're not familiar with UiPath, their ticker symbol is PATH. They specialized robotic process automation, which is basically a technology that seeks to automate simple repetitive tasks -- really simple things like moving files from one place to another, copying and pasting, logging into applications.

UiPath offers a suite of tools that help clients identify processes that can be automated, task mining, and then they can build, deploy, and manage these software robots that automate those tasks a wide variety of business processes. UiPath also infuses these bots with different types of artificial intelligence like computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning, which essentially allows them to see, understand language, make decisions. Together, robotic process automation or RPA plus artificial intelligence allows these bots to automate a combination of simple and complex tasks. So, things like moving files or updating databases, interacting with humans, extracting information from documents. And one of the important aspects of the company is that they are working on both attended and unattended bots. Unattended are bots that are working in the background; they're working on these very long business processes that don't necessarily involve a lot of human interaction. They're also working on attended bots, which work alongside humans. You can picture yourself working at a desktop computer, the bot would be working alongside you, helping you to do things a little bit more quickly.

The bots, they learned to emulate human behavior so they become more intelligent overtime. This industry in its nascent stages is still evolving, but right now UiPath does have a pretty solid lead. The company has been recognized by Gartner, Forrester Research, the International Data Corporation as a leader. In 2020, Gartner put UiPath market share at 29%, which was more than double the next closest competitor. UiPath estimates its market opportunity about $60 billion, so you can see based on the revenue figure that there's plenty of room to grow.

One of the other things I think UiPath has going forward in terms of its competitive edge is that it's built up this robust partner ecosystem that works with a lot of IT consultant for IT consultants and systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte, and they basically help companies adopt UiPath's platform. They teach them how to use it to help them get up and running so that it extends UiPath's salesforce in a way. They also have collaborations with a lot of different tech companies that basically simplify integrations with other platforms. For instance, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft 365, Salesforce. When as a customer, UiPath start using the product, there's all these pre-built integrations that you can access from the UiPath marketplace. You can start automating tasks inside Microsoft 365, almost right out of the box, so it accelerates time-to-value there.

The company has 9,630 customers now, it's up about 23% from last year. Their larger customers (the ones that are spending over $100,000) are growing even more quickly. They have 1,363 of those, up 52%. In the most recent quarter, they generated $221 million in revenue, so up 50%. The non-GAAP operating income -- which is a figure that I don't love, they're basically removing all the non-cash expenses. on-GAAP operating income was $9.1 million. The company is still free cash flow negative and they are losing money on a GAAP basis, but like I mentioned, the market opportunity is big here. I think they have plenty of room to grow, and I think it's important to protect their market leading position with some of those aggressive investments.