In March 2016 Blue Prism rang the bell on London's AIM market at a value of £48.5 million. Its shares jumped 44% on the first day. For Alastair Bathgate and David Moss it was fifteen years in the making.
The two had founded the company in 2001 in Warrington, far from the glass towers of the City. In the early years it built software for the back offices of financial firms, work like debt recovery and settlement, where people sat in front of screens copying data between systems. The first commercial product, Automate, arrived in 2003. Nobody was yet calling it a category.
SS&C Technologies then bid against Vista, and shareholders backed SS&C.
That is the long, quiet middle of this story. For years the company's pitch had no ready-made phrase to hang on. Blue Prism's own history page says it coined the term robotic process automation in 2012, a decade after founding. Once the label existed, buyers could finally search for it, and the firm that had been building it all along was suddenly early rather than strange.
The listing gave it money and visibility. By November 2016 it had offices in Chicago, Miami and the UK, and in January 2017 it opened in Austin, Texas with 86 staff worldwide. In 2019 it raised new capital and bought Thoughtonomy for up to $100 million, adding an AI engine to the platform.
Then the founders' era ended. Jason Kingdon, who had returned as chairman in 2019, took over as CEO in April 2020 as Bathgate stepped down. The company reported 2020 revenue of £141.4 million and 1,005 employees.
What almost nobody forecast was the price war for the company itself. In September 2021 Vista Equity Partners agreed to buy it for £1.095 billion, planning to fold it into TIBCO. SS&C Technologies then bid against Vista, and shareholders backed SS&C. The deal closed on 16 March 2022 at about £1.25 billion ($1.6 billion), more than twenty times the value at listing. It now runs as SS&C Blue Prism, and in April 2026 it launched WorkHQ, a platform that coordinates AI agents, software robots and people.
The founders' public record is thin on feelings, so the shape of the story has to speak. Two men in Warrington kept building through years when the market had no name for what they made. The lesson for a first-time founder is about patience: the category you are early to may take a decade to be called something, and the companies still standing when it is named get to define it.