Boss Of The Bots

Daniel Dines created the world’s hottest tech company, $7 billion UiPath, by unleashing virtual robots on office grunt work. He’s become the first bot billionaire in the process

- Alex Konrad

The man who at once epitomises the hottest new growth area in tech and the burgeoning hopes for entrepreneurship in Eastern Europe twirls a marker through his fingers as he fights the mundane urge not to bark at his employees. Instead, Daniel Dines, the co-founder and CEO of UiPath, merely scowls at the digital whiteboard ahead of an October product release. One feature raises security concerns; another hasn’t been designed properly for mobile.

Finally, Dines, a Microsoft veteran who pines for the simplicity of the Windows bottom-left start button, can no longer contain himself. Looking over central Bucharest, Romania, where he hatched UiPath, Dines rousts a product executive in Bellevue, Washington, where it’s 6.30 am. “I want you to rethink this,” Dines says. “This feels very complicated to me. It should work like Gmail works.”

Interface is crucially important to Dines because his ultimate product is something invisible to the human eye. UiPath creates bots—blocks of code that automatically carry out repetitive tasks. You might associate bots with Russian election ruses or customer service stand-ins, but UiPath recently garnered a $7 billion valuation by selling a more humdrum kind that can pull numbers from invoiced PDFs into accounting software, or process insurance claims—the mindless tasks that, like those of bank tellers or telephone operators generations ago, cry out to go the way of the dodo.