Daniel Dines is Romania's newest billionaire. UiPath, the company Dines cofounded, 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.

This shift has spawned an entirely new tech category, known as “robotic process automation,” or RPA. Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui bank group, a UiPath customer since April 2017, projects that reducing employee busywork and improving accuracy will have saved it nearly $500 million by next year. Giants like Toyota and Walmart have flocked to UiPath for similar magic. Setting up virtual robots is faster and cheaper: UiPath bot does the task endlessly, without complaint, for up to $15,000 a year. Some companies use thousands at a time.

Read the full profile on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/a....lexkonrad/2019/09/11

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