UiPath: The Automation IPO

Today, we are excited to congratulate Daniel Dines and the entire UiPath team on a groundbreaking IPO, an important milestone on their journey to enabling the fully automated enterprise and freeing workers around the world to focus on what they do best. As the industry leader in Intelligent Automation, UiPath’s IPO is one of the largest ever for an enterprise software company and is truly a watershed moment for the company, its employees, and the broader tech ecosystem in Central Europe.

We first met Daniel on a Sunday evening in August 2018, at a seafood restaurant in his home city of Bucharest. Over an al fresco dinner, he told us about his personal journey. From coming of age as the Iron Curtain fell, to moving to Seattle to work at a globally dominant software company, to quitting that highly sought-after job (and drawing puzzled reactions) to return home and bootstrap his own venture for over a decade, Daniel never lost sight of his goal. He shared his vision of a “Bot for Every Human” and the type of organization he wanted to build in UiPath. We began to realize that Daniel was no ordinary entrepreneur. For Daniel, UiPath isn’t just a business, it is the culmination of his life’s work and a way for him to leave his mark on the world. Daniel has poured every part of himself into the company he started, and his vision, bias to action, and humility permeate every part of the organization, setting the foundation for a winning culture. UiPath’s values (Humble, Bold, Immersed, Fast) have been consistent ever since and we believe they underpin UiPath’s many successes.

For UiPath, the story is not nearly over. An unintended (and undesirable) consequence of the explosion of the knowledge-driven enterprise is that literally billions of people around the world have come to accept that they will spend weeks, months, and years of their lives on manual, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks. But thanks to UiPath, that does not have to be the case! UiPath sees a future where humans are free to solve problems, innovate together, and leave the drudgery of rote, mundane processes behind. Every day, customers are using UiPath to find new areas for automation and are constantly pushing UiPath’s understanding of what is possible with their technology. This flywheel of innovation is turning UiPath into a digital transformation platform that can bring every large enterprise into the 21st century and unleash a new era of productivity around the world. In many ways, UiPath is the first software company to put the worker at the center of their product, and we believe this focus on end-user productivity will be the driving force behind the company for many decades to come.

It has been our privilege to be partners with Daniel and UiPath. To Daniel, and every member of the UiPath team, Felicitări!

Eric Liaw, Alex Lim, Jules Maltz, and Jason Kong are Investors at IVP, a later-stage venture capital firm.