Former Microsoft programmer turns ‘crazy idea’ into $US6 billion fortune

Daniel Dines struggled with life in the US after leaving his native Romania in 2001 to work for Microsoft, but the experience created the foundation for one of the world’s biggest fortunes.

The software programmer returned to his homeland in 2005 to start the business known today as UiPath, an automation-software maker that debuts Wednesday after raising $US1.3 billion ($1.7 billion) in a US initial public offering. Dines, the company’s chief executive officer, controls a stake worth more than $US6 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“For someone coming in his 20s to the US from Europe, it was a big challenge for me to adapt to the States, even though professionally speaking my experience at Microsoft was great,” Dines, 49, said last year at the annual Montgomery Summit technology conference.

As a result, “I had a crazy idea to go back and start a company,” he added.

‘Hidden advantage’

UiPath, which was valued at $US7 billion in 2019, is now worth about $US30 billion after its shares priced at $US56, above a marketed range. That puts Dines among the world’s 500 richest, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. A company representative declined to comment.

“Starting a company from a small place with no market has a hidden advantage: It forces you to think globally from day one,” Dines said in a letter included in UiPath’s registry filings for its listing. He had already indicated his company was preparing for a listing back in early 2020.

The company’s software performs many low-skilled tasks that businesses once outsourced to humans in cheaper-wage countries such as India or the Philippines. Known as robotic process automation technology, the technique takes over repetitive, routine data-entry and processing tasks. Some of its software has been used in hospitals and health-care projects to help with Covid-19, according to UiPath’s website.

Dines, who studied maths and computer science at the University of Bucharest, grew up in Romania while the nation was still ruled by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. He founded the company as DeskOver and renamed it UiPath in 2015, running it out of an apartment in the capital before relocating its headquarters to New York in 2017.