The most valuable startup in Southeast Europe, UiPath IPO listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. Romania’s UiPath, which develops software robots used by companies around the world to automate employee repetitive jobs, has set the starting price for its shares at $56.
UiPath (PATH) exceeded expectations with an initial public offering that raised $1.3 billion for the business software developer. The UiPath IPO began trading on Wednesday on the New York stock exchange under the ticker PATH.
UiPath was started in Romania with 10 people in 2005, and now UiPath IPO now has a presence in close to 30 countries, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Daniel Dines wrote in a letter to investors. “Starting a company from a small place with no market has a hidden advantage: It forces you to think globally from day one,” he wrote.
As of Jan. 31, UiPath has 7,968 customers. That’s up 32% from the same period a year ago, it says. Its customers include Adobe (ADBE), Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG), CrowdStrike (CRWD), Uber (UBER), and CVS Health (CVS). The company says its platform is designed to transform the way humans work, with software that customers use to automate both simple and complex tasks.
Silicon Valley startups are watching UiPath as an indication of public investor appetite for new tech stocks, said Carl Eschenbach, a partner at UiPath IPO investor Sequoia.
“Many others will look at this as a benchmark as to what they think about the public markets going forward,” Eschenbach, who is also a UiPath board member, said in an interview. “If the market remains as it is, there will be IPOs throughout the rest of the year, no doubt.”
The shares closed up 23% to $69 Wednesday in New York, giving UiPath a market valuation of about $36 billion. The company and investors sold almost 24 million shares on Tuesday for $56 each.