Daniel Dines, born in 1972 in Romania (53 years old), is a billionaire entrepreneur who serves as president of UiPath, a platform dedicated to robotic process automation. He is one of the richest Romanians, and Forbes, a magazine specialized in business and entrepreneurship, labeled him as the “bot master.”
UiPath is a software focused on robot automation. It was founded in 2005 by Dines and another partner, and in 2021 it went public and began trading. From that point on, the Romanian’s net worth started to grow. Dines’ rise in the business world is tied to bots and artificial intelligence software, two pillars that have driven his career.
The Romanian, before founding UiPath, worked as an engineer at Microsoft, where he stood out for creating early innovations that later helped him launch his software. UiPath is deeply involved with digitalization processes, one of the strongest trends in today’s world.
Passion for reading
Passionate about reading, Daniel once considered becoming a writer—an ambition he ultimately left behind after finishing high school. The billionaire, based in Bucharest, studied Mathematics and Computer Science. A particular detail of his story is that during university he spent more time playing poker and bridge than attending academic classes.
His professional career was linked to freelancing, a method of working where individuals operate independently. His first job was programming a website. Although Daniel wasn’t deeply immersed in the world of programming at the time, with a lot of study and a good freelance salary, he began gaining recognition.
Microsoft
After a long period as a freelance programmer, at the age of 29, Dines took a test to join Microsoft—and he passed. A position as an engineer that many in the field aspire to. One obstacle for Dines was the language barrier. Microsoft offered him a position in Seattle, but his limited knowledge of English was a deciding factor.
That period marked a 180° turn in the Romanian’s life. Without fluent English, Daniel Dines opened his own business. The project was named “Desk Over,” a business that went through several difficulties during its first six years, until Daniel radically changed its direction and developed a system capable of automatically performing repetitive tasks.
UiPath
In 2013, the company launched a line of products for manual and repetitive back-office tasks. Just a year later, the company reached $500,000 in annual revenue. And in 2015, following the timeline, the company was renamed “UiPath.” That same year also marked the opening of new offices in London, New York, Singapore, Paris, and more.
With more than 250 clients and 10,000 active members, UiPath gained significant ground in the business world. In 2017, Dines made a strategic move by relocating the company’s headquarters to New York to maintain a closer relationship with international clients.
In 2019, UiPath reported more than 5,000 clients worldwide and several acquisitions of other companies to improve its product line. Cloud Elements was also among the integrated companies, in this case as a cloud connectivity platform.
And as a complementary milestone—not a final one—in 2021 the company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. That’s why the move to the Big Apple is seen as a strategic decision. The initial fundraising exceeded $1 billion.