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Back of Napkin

UiPath Inc. PATH

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The bet you're really making is that big companies keep paying UiPath's software robots to do their dull computer work: clicking through invoices, copying data between systems, filling out forms all day with no person at the keyboard. You're betting the new wave of AI agents makes those companies buy more UiPath, not rip it out for something built into Microsoft or ChatGPT. Right now it is mixed: UiPath finally turns a real operating profit and is buying back its own shares, but growth has slowed to 12% and existing customers spend only 9% more than they did a year ago. You pay about 19 times next year's expected earnings and 4 times sales, cheaper than the stock has been since it went public in 2021.

Key data

Price$15.19
52-week range$9.20 – $19.84
P/E (ttm / fwd FY27)22.7x / 19.2x
EV/EBITDA (ttm)31.8x

PATH · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$8$13$18$23$28 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

UiPath sells robotic process automation. A customer records the steps a clerk takes across ordinary business software, logging into a portal, pulling a number, pasting it into an accounting system, and a UiPath robot then runs those steps unattended, thousands of times a day. Banks, insurers and manufacturers use it to drain the back-office work that never justified a custom application. The company charges by annual subscription, so the number that matters is annual recurring revenue: about $1.9 billion, up 12% year over year. Roughly 43% of revenue is United States, 11% Japan, no single customer above 10%. The moat is embedment: once a few hundred robots run a company's month-end close and its claims intake, replacing them means re-mapping every process, which is why customers rarely leave even as they add slowly. The live question is whether AI agents are the next thing UiPath sells or the thing that makes the robots unnecessary.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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