Thoma Bravo subsidiary Kofax, a robotic process automation (RPA) company that taps artificial intelligence (AI) to automate repetitive enterprise tasks, today announced it has agreed to acquire Nuance‘s Document Imaging division for $400 million.
Through the acquisition,”Kofax will drive customer value by adding key technologies, including cloud compatibility, scan-to-archive, scan-to-workflow, print management, and document security, to our end-to-end Intelligent Automation platform,” Kofax CEO Reynolds C. Bish said in a statement. “In addition, we will now be able to combine the best capture and print management capabilities available in the market into one product portfolio.”
As part of the arrangement, the terms of which are expected to be finalized early next year, Kofax will fold the Document Imaging division’s services into its RPA suite. Its products cover more than 6 million workers and generated $217 million in revenue last year, Kofax noted — about 11 percent of Boston, Massachusetts-based Nuance’s annual revenue.
The deal comes as the RPA market continues to see impressive growth. It’s forecast to be worth $3.11 billion by 2025, according to Grand View Research, fueled by startups like UiPath, which raised $225 million in September, and Automation Anywhere, which brought in $250 million in a July funding round.
“Nuance’s comprehensive solutions allow organizations to streamline and eliminate gaps across the full spectrum of workflows spanning the life cycle of documents, from origin to archiving,” said Al Monserrat, executive vice president and general manager at Nuance’s Imaging Division. “With Kofax, our customers will benefit from the complementary and expanded capabilities of Kofax’s Intelligent Automation platform with solutions that cater to their unique needs.”
Reuters noted that the divestment is the first major move by Mark Benjamin, who took over as Nuance’s CEO in March. The company, which has a market capitalization of roughly $5 billion and which pioneered natural language processing technology that laid the groundwork for Apple’s Siri, intends to double down on its “more profitable” ventures in health care, enterprise, and automotive sectors.
To that end, Nuance in September announced Nuance Prediction Service, a tool within its Customer Engagement Platform that enables brands to forecast client behavior and respond in an automated, contextualized fashion. In November, it partnered with Nvidia to launch the Nuance AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging, a hub where medical professionals can pick up new tools for analyzing the results of X-ray imaging, along with other radiology tools.
Source: VentureBeat
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