UiPath automates the world, one bot at a time

Google-backed automation company UiPath has grown from a $US1 billion valuation to a $US3bn valuation in just three months.

UiPath’s Andrew Phillips and Daniel Dines.

Google-backed automation company UiPath has grown from a $US1 billion valuation to a $US3bn valuation in just three months, and is now building out its local team as it looks to tackle the Australian market.

UiPath represents former AWS Australia and New Zealand boss Andrew Phillips’s first gig since departing the cloud-computing giant, and he saidhe knew early on that UiPath’s technology would be transformative.

“I knew my next role was going to be changing the way customers work and, from my perspective, I was looking for a technology that was going to change the way that any type of organisation worked and operated,” he said.

“This is an interesting technology, it’s not just a faster database or more efficient storage. It forces businesses to think about what they do in different ways.”

UiPath’s automation platform takes repetitive tasks and automates them with the help of a robot, as well as AI using IBM’s Watson, Google and Microsoft AI technologies.

The company is backed by big investment names including Accel, Google, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.

“We’ve seen tremendous growth in the past three years, we’ve been growing 600 and 700 per cent,” UiPath chief executive and founder Daniel Dines told The Australian. “We started in a small country (Romania) in the European Union, and that helped us think global from day one. Really big companies born in the US, for example, don’t think like that.”

According to Mr Dines, UiPath’s automation technology will be increasingly important as countries grapple with ageing populations and the retirement of Baby Boomers.

“It’s shifting from a luxury to a must,” he said. “SMBC, the big Japanese bank, will achieve $250 million in savings by 2020 from robotic process automation alone, through our technology. They are putting a bot for every person in the bank.”

Mr Phillips said UiPath would soon have 50 employees in Australia, and was targeting the public sector here.

“We want to release the robot from the person and are also looking at local governments, helping them automate things like rates notices or dog licensing.”

For Mr Dines, every job, no matter the industry, would benefit from some sort of automation.

“There are some things you just don’t like to do,” he said. “So the total addressable market for this really is taking every task that people don’t like to do, and delegating them to machines.”