Robots are slowly but surely replacing humans in repetitive, manual work as technology and robotics advance. Just consider the production of cars as an example of how commonplace this is.
However, are you familiar with digital robots?
One of the largest RPA, or robotic process automation, firms in the world, UiPath, founded in Bucharest, was valued at over $1 billion in 2018, and went public in 2021.
UiPath and its investors sold about 23.9 million shares at $56 apiece, bringing in $1.34 billion in the IPO. . It was Romania’s first unicorn company.
But who are UiPath and how did they grow to be one of the most valuable companies in Romania?
Here is what transpired. In 2005, Daniel Dinas and Marius Cerca started the company in Bucharest under the name ‘Descover, before switching to UiPath.
RPA, or robotic process automation, was the idea behind the company. RPA essentially entails the creation of digital software robots or blocks of code that perform repetitive back office activities like extracting numbers from invoices and entering them into accounting software.
Employees are essentially handed time back, so they can concentrate on more critical jobs. Will this lead to lost jobs in future? Most likely, since now you no longer require 20 employees. You only need one individual who will act as the system’s supervisor.
So How Did UiPath Come Into Existance
The creator and CEO, Daniel Dinas, was born and raised in Romania, the son of a teacher and an engineer. As a child, he initially wanted to be a writer before realising he had a hidden aptitude for mathematics. In the 1990s, he began by operating a website for job listing,s before learning that programmers in Bucharest were making a pretty respectable living.
He borrowed a C++ book and taught himself, and by 2001 he had won himself a position at Microsoft. He moved to Seattle, despite scarcely speaking any English and only being able to understand 50% of what was being spoken during his first few years.
By 2005, Linus had moved back to Bucharest and had established Descova, a tech outsourcing company. However, in the early years of the phone, they had trouble gaining traction and nearly went out of business when they lost its biggest outsourcing client.
In order to assist developers code more quickly, they started offering software development kits, which helped to maintain the business. The primary turning point occurred in 2012 when an Indian company ran a trial project to determine which RPA technology was best.
Deskova won despite not yet having their software specifically adapted for that market. Vinaz dispatched some of his team to the firm after realising that RPA—a term popularised by a rival, Blue Prism—was where the company needed to turn in order to replace the requirement for people to perform tedious, repetitive tasks like data input all day long with software robots.
By the time they reached 2014, their desktop automation application, which was based on Microsoft’s Workflow Designer, had generated $500,000 in sales.
In order to develop the business more quickly, Linus shifted the focus of his company to attracting more profitable clients like tech startups and converted the company to a subscription-based software as a service model.
Changing The Software to UiPath
Finally, he modified the name to UiPath to make it sound more like a technical term in their own code. Because these corporations already had connections to companies seeking to increase efficiency, Linus was astute enough to collaborate with them rather than try to compete with them.
In other words, they served as the UiPath sales force by using UiPath to automate their own tasks and introduce UiPath to their clients.
They now collaborate with many of the largest corporations in the world, including as GE and Toyota, saving some businesses tens of thousands of man hours annually.
The company opened offices in Bangalore, New York, and London, some for geographical coverage and others for outsourcing, with the ultimate objective being global coverage and becoming a publicly traded company, similar to rival Blue Prism.
In 2017, UiPath was named the RPA industry leader by Forester Wave, demonstrating the superiority of their software and bringing in new customers like Generali, Lufthansa, BMW, Allianz, Morningstar, and BMW with clients all around the world in a variety of industries.
The Chief Robotics Officer, Boris Cromerie, said that the secret to their rapid success was employing the best people, expanding the sales, product development, and customer support operations to enter new markets.
It offers a digital workforce and aims to grow into a sizable publicly traded firm. Because their product is software, they are able to scale swiftly, and investors claim they have never witnessed growth of this magnitude.
In an effort to help the ageing population crisis, which will eventually result in a shortage of labour, UiPath has also entered the Japanese market.
Its estimated that 200 firms have saved close to 500,000 hours thanks to RPA. Due to the rapid expansion, UiPath has received some significant funding.
In 2018, the $1 billion Series B funding round that Alphabet’s Capital G investment firm participated in, raised $153 million.
The Vision Fund of SoftBank has also shown interest in them. Veness, however, declined Masayoshi Son’s billion-dollar bid, which also included board control and share dilution.
He therefore decided to spearhead a new funding round valued at $3 billion for the company, led by Sequoia Capital and Capital GE. This opened the door for additional Google cooperation in the future to enhance their AI capabilities.
The company was valued at $7 billion in an additional round of fundraising in April 2019. This may seem like a lofty valuation, but it reflects UiPath’s performance, as seen by the fact that the business’s sales increased by 620% annually from 2015 to 2018—making it the second-fastest-growing company in the Americas.
Daniel Dines now recognises that in order to be successful in business, one must fully comprehend the industry in which one competes and develop a strategy to make that market better.
Dines wanted every person to have a robot, much like Bill Gates wanted a computer in every home. The RPA market is expected to expand significantly in the coming years, and UiPath will undoubtedly be at the forefront of the market wherever there is a manual operation.
In 2021 the company went public.
The stock continues to climb and has been a success in most eyes.