 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. And there's a company that we've been following now for the last couple of years and a trend in robotic process automation. And then automation specifically. It's a company in an area that we really like. We've been researching this and publishing and Daniel Dines is here. He's the CEO of UiPath. Daniel, it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for inviting me, David. That's our pleasure. So let's get an update on your business. You know, COVID obviously sent everybody for a loop. We had been and have been following you guys quite closely. How are things going for UiPath? How has the pandemic affected your business? We've designed this company from day one to work in a hybrid mode, local, and obviously working from anywhere. And the transition to working from anywhere model was really fast to implement for us. So COVID in itself didn't affect the way we work. On the business side, I would say that we are seeing, you know, a mix of events. Some industries that were mostly affected by COVID were putting their budgets on hold while other industries were increasing 10 times. What I can tell you that in a nutshell, the numbers for us were really good. We are able to hitting and beating the targets that we set pre-COVID. And we focus quite a lot on helping our customers, navigating through these market waters. We have quite a lot of involvement in healthcare and federal business. We worked with a few hospitals to help with accelerating COVID tests. In one case, we were able to save two hours a day for every nurse. So instead of filling up paperwork, they were able to focus on their patient. And that's not one isolated instance. We've done tremendous work across the globe. And, you know, that we raised our last round in June, end of June, and that was a recognition of our accelerated business. Right, yes. I mean, you raised it in the middle of the pandemic. You know, I've been saying that, I mean, everybody of course says that COVID has accelerated a number of trends. And I've been saying there's now an increased mandate for automation. I think there was before, but yeah, maybe there was some complacency, although you didn't see it in your numbers. You guys obviously growing very, very fast. You mentioned healthcare, I would think of banking and financial as well, which of course was a stronghold. When you think about in the U.S. anyway, the Payroll Protection Act and the number of loans that had to be processed, you know, bankers would talk to me and say, our volume increased towards the magnitude. We had no way to do it. And they turned to automation, you know, to do that. So I've said that there is an automation mandate. And I think there has been because of the productivity gap, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, you don't see it so much and of course in China, but certainly the U.S. in the last couple of decades has declined in terms of productivity. So, you know, people are not going to be able to solve the world's biggest problems without automation. How are you thinking about that in this post COVID world? David, as you said, the awareness that we have to automate has increased 10 times compared to pre-COVID days. I would not say that yet automation is number one priority on this company's leaders agenda, not in the same way as conferencing and video conferencing and all this directly affected, positively affected the software industries. But I believe that while automation is slower to adapt and it requires a lot more investment to adapt, it's gonna dominate the agenda post COVID in the sense that people will have to recoup, you know, all the losses that they had in the COVID. They learn their lessons. And, you know, for instance, I talked with a few CEOs of large, you know, Fortune 500 businesses and they are telling me, Daniel, I wish that we have started earlier. So now we are seeing, you know, an adoption that is more top-down, an adoption that is starting from the C-level suite, even the CEO of large enterprises. Yeah, I mean, it seems to me that if a customer has tasted, you know, the benefits of RPA and automation and realizes what it can do for their business, they're going to maybe double download, especially in a time when revenues might be under pressure and you're not hiring. I know a lot of people have put, you know, hiring freezes on a number of head layoffs. So you got to do more with less. Guys, I wonder if you could bring up this chart. I want to share this and get Daniel's reaction. We're talking about land and expand. So this is ETR data and what it does is it asks customers where they're at, do they know about a vendor? In this case, it's UI path is on the left and automation anywhere and then some others. But do you know about the vendor and are you planning on, you know, are you evaluating it? Are you planning to implement it? And this chart shows those respondents that said, yes, we are a customer and we plan to expand our usage and you can see over the last three surveys, the yellow is even, you know, an uptick. And so people, this is essentially the takeaway here is that once people taste it, that you land and then they expand and find new use cases. Are you seeing that in your business and maybe you could give us some high-level examples? We're seeing it quite a lot. We have today more than 60 customers with over a million dollars in spending with us. There are more than 800 customers that spend more than 100K with us. And our net expansion rate is more than 140% consistently over many past quarters. That shows a very solid expansion desire from our customers and it shows that our technology is very well suitable for large-case automation, deployments, enterprise-wide, especially with our program, a robot for every person, we are seeing huge interest and way bigger deals. We are able to land upfront, work to upscale our existing customers. You know, in a way, I don't believe that in five years from now on, we will ever have people just to minusly move data from one screen to the other. I think this is a thing of the past as much as plowing the fields as a thing of the past. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about where you've come from as a company. So I mean, you started in 2005. So I mean, I think of you as a startup but you've been around for a long time. And my sense is you started as a product company but recently you guys announced this end-to-end platform for what you call, or maybe Gartner calls, I don't know if it's their term of hyper-automation but you've gone from a product company to a platform company. I wonder if you could talk about how you think about that transition and the platform generally. To become a platform requires a certain maturity level and it's in a way a harder business to promote to an enterprise customer. They are very likely to test water with the product but when betting everything, automation, wide on a platform, it's a different game. So this is why we had to go from the steps of products, product then like a couple of products and then putting everything together into a platform. The power of the platform in this particular instance comes from the integration of all pieces in a platform. And an automation wide platform will have different sets of product that play from the discovery of the processes that you automate to the implementation and maintenance of the process into the analytics that helps you track your progress and also you have technologies that addresses to different persona in an enterprise from software engineers, RPA developers into the citizen developers. So it's a huge offering and what is really important for us is that we give a full-fledged platform. So an enterprise customer knows we will be able to build everything on the top of this platform and they will offer best-in-class where it matters. And we believe that best-in-class matters in few important areas like RPA, like process mining, like analytics, while they will offer good enough where they will offer integration with best-in-class products where it's not so important in the grand scheme of deploying automation. The integration is tremendously important piece. Put yourself in the shoes of a big enterprise instead of buying 20 different products, different licensing agreement, different maintenance staff, different teams to support them. You just have one and you have the guarantee they work very well together. It's a very big proposition and it requires maturity of the platform and we are making big strides into having the credibility that is required to have such a big investment. Well, I have to bring that up, I have to ask you. So you guys are obviously RPA and automation specialists building out a platform, very focused on that. And we always talk about this best-of-breed versus integrated suites and you're sort of talking about integration. Of course, we saw Microsoft come out and as well as others, IBM, I think SAP have announced what I would consider 1.0 products, not nearly as robust as you and some of your leading competition. But how do you think about that in terms of staying ahead of that? I mean, we all know Microsoft, you used to work there, they come out with a 1.0 and then the 2.0 and then eventually they get it right. So you have to move fast. Yes, absolutely. And we proved that we can move fast. We've built this company from zero, five years ago to, you know, we are almost half a billion dollar in ARR today. So we are fast. This is one of the core tenets of our culture, be fast. But speaking about the strategy, I believe that the space of low-code, no-code business application development and the hyper-automation space will converge into one single space. A company like Microsoft started with a simple product like EFTTT and that was dedicated only to cities and developers to build very, you know, small and quick integrations. Like if you look at Power Automate use cases, you'll see one of the most common use cases to set an alarm for myself. Well, I understand the value of such use case, but it's a far cry from setting an alarm and to automating, you know, end-to-end procure to pay or order to cash for a big enterprise or COVID testing. And basically we are coming from two different angles. We are coming from the RPA angle that is putting computer vision at the center of the technology and they are coming from quick API integration. And we are making progress, you know, towards each other. My belief, I believe that we have an advantage here in a sense that RPA is a technology that can produce immediate returns at a large scale. While the other type of technologies, first of all, traditional automation and then all this new type of API economy, API integrations and a largely failed to show scalability within big enterprises. They are nice to have, but they are not essential. When you are choosing a platform, my take is that you are choosing a platform based on what you need the most. This is where you choose the best in class and you need the certainty that you partner with the vendor that invest the most. Well, this is our bread and butter, this is where we start. And of course we are offering every piece that the other are doing where they are also getting into our world. But our advantage being cloud agnostic, being ERP agnostic, being CRM agnostic and having started from the most sensitive technology that offer you the most savings and the best productivity increases, it's a tremendous advantage. And of course you know I'm excited about this opportunity and I've talked to a number of your customers and so to me that's the proof in the pudding. But you mentioned you're incurring revenue approaching half a billion. So I got to add and you know as well that in my breaking analysis, we took a look at the total available market for RPA. And then I think, well we've extended that. I think we kind of missed the broader automation agenda and the platform thinking and we've updated those figures. I mean it's hundreds of billions of dollars of an opportunity at least. And so the reason I bring this up is of course last week we saw the hottest software IPO in history and Snowflake. There's a company with $400 million ARR growing at 120%. The company went from early this year, $15 billion valuation went up to 20, went up to 30. They launched at 33 billion within five minutes it was worth 80 billion. Of course it's settling down now in the 60 billion but unbelievable. And I would argue that your total available market is perhaps even larger. I would say it is larger because it has a deeper business impact than say a Snowflake. And of course people who watch my programs know that I'm a very high on that company. So my question is, what do you think about that IPO? How are you thinking about your own IPO? It would seem that UiPath is in a great position to at some point become a public company. We are first of all, if you are speaking about the time where nobody would argue that our time is not higher than Snowflake time. We can argue that their market is maybe more consolidated. Everybody understands data market in a way and our market might be way more scattered across different use cases. But in a way it's the market of data versus the market of all data versus all processes in the world. It's there way more people are tasked today with processes than to analyzing and working with data. And so we are going after a very large problem that we have to solve. And we have to empower people of doing what they are naturally built to do, like talking to other people, socially interact, being creative, making decisions instead of doing this numbing part of their daily jobs that are required by this state of the industry. So our time we talked with different bankers and I've seen various figures from like 200 billion to weigh into like two trillions for something that it's maybe. So no, I think time is a problem. It's the way we, I think we, what we wanna build, it's a durable business and it's a durable growth while in the same time being cash flow positive. And we are very close to achieve these goals. And that will, I believe that will be a very compelling proposition for our own IPO. I don't know if we can get snowflake multiples or not, but this is definitely not the biggest thing on my agenda. My agenda is to build a long-term sustainable, durable business. I am looking to next five to 10 years of this business. An IPO is just the fundraising event in, you know, after all. Great, so yeah, that's good. I wanted to ask you kind of what the parameters are. And I think you answered it, is you're not rushing to get in, to draft off of some event that you had no control over. That notion of cash flow positive is really interesting to me. I said about the snowflake IPO, there are plenty of TAM just like you guys and I agreed somewhere between 200 billion and three trillion, that's about right. But I think that what I said about snowflakes IPO is that I'm not worried about their lack of profitability right now. At some point, I'm really going to be focused on their operating cash flow. And if you can come out with the large TAM, your growth that you're at, the large ARR and cash flow positive, I can't wait to see that IPO, Daniel. That's going to be super exciting. So we'll be patient. But Daniel, thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE. You're always a great guest. Really appreciate the update on your business. Thank you so much, Dave. Really appreciate the invitation. Thanks. You're welcome. And keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE.