UiPath: No More TPS Reports!

Bill Lumbergh is shaking in his suspenders. Today, IVP is thrilled to announce our partnership with UiPath, the global market leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). For those of you who have to complete boring, repetitive, time-consuming and soul-crushing tasks at work, like putting cover pages on your TPS reports, UiPath is your new best friend. UiPath is putting software-based robots in the enterprise, unshackling professionals to work on higher-output activities. At IVP, we have been fortunate enough to invest in several category-defining enterprise companies, such as AppDynamics, Dropbox, GitHub, HashiCorp, Rubrik, and Slack, and we believe that UiPath is leading the charge in a new wave of Enterprise Automation technologies that will fundamentally improve the way we work.

Why we invested:

Every Enterprise Needs UiPath

Massive enterprise software markets are usually built slowly, as organizations slowly develop, test, and iterate new solutions before adding them to their technology stacks. Not so for RPA, which has exploded in the last three years. The roots of the massive opportunity for RPA lie in decades of growth of complex and interconnected enterprise systems. Enterprises became increasingly sophisticated, but an unexpected side effect was the volume of unproductive tasks performed by employees grew exponentially. The amount of human and financial capital required by the modern enterprise required to ingest, coordinate, manage and track all of a company’s undertakings led to the rise of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry, estimated to be over $150 billion. The corporate pain is real and enterprises have been thirsting for a better solution. Enter UiPath, which allows enterprises to use automated software robots, which have higher performance and even more compelling economics than offshoring. UiPath further improves on traditional RPA by empowering users to design, deploy and monitor robots from their computers, and freeing users to focus on higher-order tasks that create business value. As a result of these market tailwinds and UiPath’s superior, market-leading architecture, demand for UiPath robots has skyrocketed and made UiPath one of the fastest growing software companies ever, scaling from $1M to $100M in annual recurring revenue in less than 21 months.

Culture is the Foundation for Growth

When we first met Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath, in his hometown of Bucharest, he told us a remarkable personal story of full of conviction, grit, and humility. From his formative years, Daniel blazed his own trail, graduating high school just as the Iron Curtain collapsed. The resulting transition in Romania was a very difficult time for many, yet Daniel’s talent and work ethic led him to Microsoft. For many, leaving the broken promises of communism for a comfortable position in Bellevue would be fully satisfying. But, in 2005, not content with five years of outstanding contributions, Daniel bet on himself and moved home to Bucharest to fulfill his life-long ambitions of becoming an entrepreneur. UiPath was not an overnight success, yet Daniel and his team stuck with their mission. Working from Bucharest, they spent many years bootstrapping revenue from customers around the world and developing product at the same time. When UiPath found product-market-fit in RPA and began growing rapidly, the culture they developed over “the lean years” became a pillar of the company and is now one of its greatest assets. Their culture has allowed UiPath to scale to over 1,700 employees, open offices in 16 countries, and sign thousands of happy customers.

The Best is Yet to Come

The future is even brighter for UiPath. Daniel’s vision for UiPath is ambitious and includes using RPA to introduce machine learning and artificial intelligence into customer operations, which drastically increase the impact of the UiPath platform. To help him capitalize on this important opportunity, Daniel has built a world-class management team, recruiting exceptional talent from leading technology companies, and partnered with top venture investors like Accel, CapitalG, Credo, Earlybird, Kleiner Perkins, Madrona, Meritech, and Sequoia. At IVP, we look forward to working with the UiPath team and board to build the pre-eminent company in Enterprise Automation.

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