Blue Prism acquires UK's Thoughtonomy for up to $100M to expand its RPA platform with more AI

Robotic process automation -- which lets organizations shift repetitive back-office tasks to machines to complete -- has been a hot area of growth in the world of enterprise IT, and now one of the companies that's making waves in the area has acquired a smaller startup to continue extending its capabilities. Blue Prism, which helped coin the term RPA when it was founded back in 2001, has announced that it is buying Thoughtonomy, which has built a cloud-based AI engine that delivers RPA-based solutions on a SaaS framework. Blue Prism is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange -- where its market cap is around £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion), and in a statement to the market alongside its half-year earnings, it said it would be paying up to £80 million ($100 million) for the firm.