UiPath IPO Review

UiPath History

The world is moving towards more and more automation, and businesses around the world are optimizing their processes and replacing jobs with robots. This means in a couple of decades most human jobs will become irrelevant and most people will starve to death unless they obey some kind of world government to own nothing and be happy. Oh wait, that’s for a different article. Anyways, as everything is becoming more and more automated, some companies are leading the way in this process and UiPath is one of them.

UiPath was founded in Romania in 2005 as DeskOver, a business focused on building automation scripts. In 2013, DeskOver made a move into robotic process automation or RPA by releasing UiPath Desktop Automation, its first suite of tools for automating manual and repetitive office tasks.

In 2015, the company decided to change its name to the name of its main product, UiPath and, after a seed funding round they opened offices all around the world, including London, New York, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Despite the company’s glamorous slogan “robot for every person,” the actual tasks the company helps businesses automate is a tiny bit more mundane than the plot of “I, Robot.” RPA helps with things like logging into applications, moving files, completing forms, extracting invoice data, scanning loan applications, and so on. However, that’s a whole range of mundane repetitive things humans don’t have to do and these tasks can be performed without any human control.

In 2015, the company launched its UiPath Academy and started to provide free courses to train RPA developers, because it usually requires someone to build a bot that will carry out the specific tasks that a business needs automating.

By 2018, the company became a unicorn after it raised $153 million in its Series B funding stage and surpassed a $1 billion valuation.

The company has gained worldwide recognition and awards by top business media outlets, including Forbes, Deloitte, and CNBC. UiPath also received a number of awards for employee satisfaction such as Comparably’s Best Place to Work and Best Company for Women.

By November 2019 UiPath had 5,000 customers worldwide and had a massive 500,000-strong developer community.

By this point, after multiple funding rounds and acquisitions the management must have started asking themselves, “when is UiPath going public?” Read on to find out about UiPath IPO 2021 and other key info.

UiPath Public Listing Key Data and IPO Date

UiPath IPO Date: April 21, 2021
Ticker: PATH
Exchange: NYSE
IPO stock price: $56
Valuation at IPO: $28 billion
Market cap (10/12/22): $9.35 billion
CEO: Daniel Dines
Category: Software

UiPath launched its IPO on the NYSE on April 21, 2021 and began trading under the stock symbol PATH.

The UiPath IPO price was set at $56, closing the first day of trading at $68 per share, up 31%.

UiPath decided to offer shares directly to the public, called a direct public offering, following in the footsteps of companies like Spotify, Palantir, and Asana. So technically it wasn’t an IPO but a DPO.

CEO and co-founder Daniel Dines, who owns a considerable chunk of the company, saw his net worth increase to $6 million on their IPO date.

So What About Investing Now?

UiPath is a solid business that lets other companies eliminate unnecessary repetitive tasks become as efficient as possible, which lets them optimize processes and scale easier. As AI is expected to grow, UiPath can be expected to benefit from this, constantly improving their technology and providing more capabilities.

The company has big potential in sectors like healthcare that are overwhelmed with a lot of paperwork and data entry, and UiPath’s technology may even be able to eliminate unnecessary errors caused by human error and boredom.

The UiPath IPO became one of the largest software IPOs in history, which made sense for one of the most valuable private companies it was just before that with a value of $35 billion.

However, a year and a half after their IPO date, their stock price is over 80% down, and their market cap is at $6.375 billion. This is the harsh reality of facing the public markets. When people don’t buy your shares, they go down in price.

Still, it does seem like the future is bright for RPA technology, buying low may be a good opportunity. If you believe in this area of tech, you may find that spreading your investment over a number of similar companies in a field is safer than going for just one company.

Investments like IPOs are speculative and much riskier than big companies with proven business models, robust earnings, and potential to scale. While it’s fun to try, don’t rely on IPOs to bring you money as timing the market is hard. An even better approach is to build a balanced portfolio of stocks in an industry you know or believe in. Download Gainy to check out TTF stock collections to invest in themes you like.

Check out our IPO section to look at other scheduled IPOs. If you want to find companies that match your interests, investment goals and portfolio, try Gainy for some great IPO investment ideas, as well as established blue-chip companies and a variety of other assets.

FAQ

Is UiPath a public company?

Yes, the UiPath stock IPO date was April 21, 2021. The provider of automation software was listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker PATH.

Is UiPath Software Inc. a SPAC?

Actually, UiPath opted for a direct listing. This is when a company offers its shares directly to the public. This is different from a traditional IPO when new shares are released onto the market, and different from merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The latter was a popular way for companies to go public in 2020-21 but many of these launches didn’t do well.