San Jose-built enterprise RPA + Agentic Process Automation platform — founded 2003 as Tethys Solutions by four Indian-American co-founders (Mihir Shukla, Neeti Mehta Shukla, Ankur Kothari, Rushabh Parmani), rebranded 2010, $550M+ Series A in 2018 at $1.8B and $290M Series B at $6.8B post-money led by Salesforce Ventures with SoftBank Vision Fund — now in reverse-IPO merger talks with C3.AI as of January 2026
Automation Anywhere is one of the two enterprise-RPA category leaders (alongside UiPath) and historically the favourite RPA platform for Indian IT-services firms (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, Cognizant) implementing automation for global banking and insurance clients. The company was founded in 2003 as Tethys Solutions, LLC in San Jose, California by four Indian-American co-founders: Mihir Shukla (CEO, Chairman), Neeti Mehta Shukla (Chief Impact Officer) — one of the few women globally to have co-founded a $1B+ company — Ankur Kothari (COO), and Rushabh Parmani. The company rebranded to Automation Anywhere, Inc. in 2010 as the RPA category took shape. Funding arc: a $550 million+ Series A in 2018 ($250M from Goldman Sachs / NEA / General Atlantic in July, expanded by a $300M SoftBank Vision Fund tranche in November at a $1.8B valuation), followed by a $290M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures at a $6.8B post-money valuation. Headline 2026 development: in late January 2026 The Information reported that Automation Anywhere is in talks to merge with publicly-traded C3.AI in a reverse-IPO deal — Automation Anywhere would acquire C3.AI and use the resulting entity to go public, sidestepping a traditional IPO. Talks are preliminary; no deal certainty as of May 2026. For Indian enterprises, AA serves over 5,000 businesses globally and is genuinely strong in BFSI, manufacturing, IT-services, and government; the Bangalore and Hyderabad offices give it real India-time-zone delivery capacity that very few US RPA vendors match. AA is the right call for Indian banks and IT-services clients on legacy-systems automation; the wrong call for SMBs or product-engineering teams (use n8n, Zapier, or Power Automate instead).
Automation Anywhere is a cloud-native enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform that lets organisations build software "bots" — attended bots that run alongside a human user, and unattended bots that run in the background — to automate repetitive business processes across legacy systems, modern SaaS, mainframes, ERPs, and now LLM-backed AI agents. The current flagship product is the Automation Anywhere 360 (A360) platform, marketed since 2024 as the company's Agentic Process Automation surface — RPA bots that can call AI agents (using Automation Co-Pilot and AI Agent Studio) and reason about unstructured inputs (PDFs, emails, chat) rather than just clicking through structured screens.
The company was founded in 2003 in San Jose, California as Tethys Solutions, LLC by four co-founders: Mihir Shukla, Neeti Mehta Shukla, Ankur Kothari, and Rushabh Parmani — all of Indian origin, with Mihir Shukla becoming one of the most prominent Indian tech CEOs in Silicon Valley. The company rebranded to Automation Anywhere, Inc. in 2010 as the RPA category started to crystallise. Today, Mihir Shukla is CEO and Chairman, Neeti is Chief Impact Officer, and Ankur Kothari serves as COO.
Automation Anywhere's funding arc is one of the most dramatic in the RPA category. The company bootstrapped for 15 years before its 2018 Series A: $250 million in July 2018 from Goldman Sachs, NEA, General Atlantic and World Innovation Lab, immediately followed by a $300 million expansion in November 2018 from the SoftBank Vision Fund — together a $550M+ Series A at a $1.8 billion valuation, one of the largest single-round investments in enterprise software history at the time. The company subsequently raised a $290M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures at a $6.8B post-money valuation, with continued participation from SoftBank, Goldman Sachs, NEA, World Innovation Lab and Workday Ventures.
The company today serves 5,000+ businesses globally and reports running over 300 million AI agents across customer environments. India footprint is significant: large delivery and engineering operations in Bangalore and Hyderabad, deep partnerships with Indian IT-services firms (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, Cognizant, Tech Mahindra) who use AA as the underlying RPA layer for their global banking, insurance and BPO clients. Indian-domestic customers are concentrated in BFSI (HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, SBI affiliates, large NBFCs), manufacturing (Mahindra, Tata Steel, Bajaj), and government / public-sector (Income Tax, GST, large PSUs).
In late January 2026, The Information reported that Automation Anywhere is in talks to merge with C3.AI (NYSE: AI), the publicly-traded enterprise AI software company founded by tech veteran Thomas Siebel (founder of Siebel Systems, later sold to Oracle). Under the reported deal structure, Automation Anywhere would acquire C3.AI and the combined entity would inherit C3.AI's public listing — effectively a reverse-IPO that bypasses the traditional S-1 / roadshow process.
This is a developing story and as of May 2026 the talks remain preliminary with no deal certainty. Indian buyers and procurement teams should treat this as a watching brief, not a basis for changing existing RPA contracts. The strategic logic, if a deal does happen, is straightforward: C3.AI brings an enterprise AI platform with strong vertical models (utilities, oil & gas, defence, manufacturing) while Automation Anywhere brings the RPA execution layer plus 5,000+ enterprise customers — together a more credible end-to-end "agentic enterprise automation" story against Microsoft Copilot Studio + Power Automate, UiPath + Agentic Orchestration, and Salesforce Agentforce. C3.AI's stock has rallied on the news but analysts remain split on whether a takeover actually saves the publicly-traded company's revenue trajectory.
What Indian buyers should do right now: if you have an existing AA contract, the deal — if it closes — is more likely to add AI capabilities than to remove RPA functionality; standard M&A continuity language in enterprise contracts should protect you. If you are currently evaluating AA versus UiPath, the C3.AI talks are a factor but not the dominant one — feature parity, India delivery, and total cost of ownership over a 3-year horizon still drive the decision more than the corporate transaction. Re-evaluate procurement assumptions if and when a definitive agreement is signed.
Attended bots run alongside a human user (e.g. a service-desk agent triggering an automated workflow); unattended bots run in the background on a schedule or trigger (e.g. overnight invoice processing). Both are first-class in A360 with shared Control Room governance.
LLM-backed AI agents that can read unstructured inputs (PDFs, emails, IVR transcripts), reason about them, and trigger downstream bot workflows. This is the "Agentic Process Automation" positioning that drives the 2024-2026 product story.
Intelligent Document Processing — extract structured data from invoices, KYC documents, claim forms, ID proofs. Heavily used by Indian BFSI customers for account-opening, KYC remediation, and insurance-claims automation.
Centralised admin, RBAC, audit logs, bot deployment / scheduling / monitoring, and SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA / GDPR compliance posture. Critical for Indian BFSI customers facing RBI audit requirements.
Pre-built bot library — 1,500+ ready bots for common SAP / Oracle / Salesforce / mainframe processes. Reduces time-to-first-automation for Indian IT-services firms implementing for clients.
A360 runs as fully-managed Cloud, customer-managed Cloud, or on-premises — the on-premises deployment is meaningful for Indian banks and government PSUs where RBI data-residency rules prevent public-cloud RPA deployments.
Automation Anywhere's pricing is genuinely complex and there is no public pricing page for Enterprise — most contracts go through sales. Indicative 2026 ranges from third-party trackers (Vendr, TrustRadius, automationatlas.io):
The page's previous "₹20L–60L/year for Indian enterprises" was directionally correct for the lower mid-market band but missed both the per-bot pricing model and the much higher upper-bound for large BFSI deployments — a typical SBI / HDFC Bank-class AA contract sits in the ₹4–15 crore/year range, not the ₹20L floor. Pricing is also USD-denominated with 18% IGST, and Indian buyers typically negotiate FIRA-friendly invoicing terms for service-export adjustment.
Automation Anywhere is the wrong call when: you're an Indian startup or SMB looking to automate SaaS workflows (use n8n, Zapier, or Make — AA's $750/user/month minimum is overkill); you're already deeply on Microsoft (Power Automate is bundled in many E3/E5 licences and is the obvious default); you're a product-engineering team doing API-to-API automation (use n8n or build it natively — RPA is for screen-scraping legacy UIs, not for engineering-led automation); or you do not have an in-house Centre-of-Excellence to govern bot proliferation, which becomes a maintenance nightmare without one.