UiPath receives USD 153 mln, raises valuation to USD 1.1 bn to become first Romanian unicorn

Georgeta Gheorghe 06/03/2018 | 18:54

UiPath, the Romanian start-up that emerged in the past years as the leader of the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market, raised USD 153 million in a Series B funding  round, driving the company’s valuation to up to USD 1.1 billion. The announcement was made by UiPath CEO Daniel Dines in Bucharest. 

The fresh funds came from previous investors Accel, which last year contributed with a USD 30 million Series A investment, Capital G, the fund behind Google, and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, with contributions from early backers Earlybird, Credo Ventures and Seedcamp.

The company’s RPA platform enables enterprises to deploy digital workforces across their operational business processes to carry out repetitive tasks and processes, increasing productivity and boosting customer service through back-office and front-office operations.

In 2017 UiPath has seen a year of growth, which was reflected in a significant increase of its customer base to over 700 and has seen revenues increase eightfold. Moreover,  the RPA services provider gathered a community of over 120,ooo developers worldwide, which benefit from training via the company’s UiPath Academy.

People are UiPath’s ‘secret sauce’

According to co-founder and CEO Daniel Dines, the secret to UiPath’s spectacular growth are the people. “The people are the company’s ‘secret sauce’. We built the company looking at Silicon Valley. But what’s the secret of building a company? Everyone thinks it’s technology. But we believe it is important to build a team of people. In 2014, 2015, it seemed that we had competitors that were giants but we didn’t look up to them or copy what they were doing. Instead, we developed our own product and started to grow the team and things exploded. And what we realised is that we must hire people who are smarter than us. We are anti-boss and have an open culture, there is transparency and everyone has access to information ,” Dines explained.

Today the company has offices in over 14 countries and employs more than 590 professionals. “Our company today is not Romanian, American or Japanese. It is a modern, global company, with a lot of Frenchmen, Japanese, Chinese. You cannot build a company with people from one country only, we must attract the best people globally,” Dines added.

Listing on the NASDAQ is impending 

“The investment will help us accelerate the pace of growth.  We will invest massively in the company’s global expansion,” said Dines. Future plans include the opening of a new centre in Romania, as well as new offices in Bangalore (India) and Seattle (US), to serve a customer base expected to double in 2018. The company’s new customers include Huawei, BMW Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and Morningstar.

“I believe we’ve barely tapped into 10-20 percent of the global (RPA) market. We believe we have built a company that could be valued in the future at tens of billions of dollars,” Dines said, adding that the company is set to list on the NASDAQ in two years’ time.

By reaching a valuation of USD 1.1 billion, the company succeeded in increasing its value ten fold since the last round of funding.

On Monday, UiPath received the Award for Commitment to Innovation in Technology during the annual Business Review Awards.

 

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