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(Reuters) — Shares of automation software provider UiPath jumped 23.21% in their New York Stock Exchange debut on Wednesday, underscoring investors’ appetite for high-growth tech stocks.
The stock closed its first day on the stock market at $69 a share, up from its $56 IPO price on Tuesday, giving the company a market capitalization of $35.82 billion.
“This is just a milestone,” Daniel Dines, chief executive and co-founder told Reuters in an interview. “Starting from tomorrow, our focus is posting a good quarter, and we’re really marching on our vision of empowering everyone through automation.”
Backed by the likes of Accel, Dragoneer and Coatue Management, UiPath uses artificial intelligence and low-code tools to help large corporations and government agencies automate repetitive and routine tasks in areas such as accounting and human resources.
Several richly valued startups, including cryptocurrency exchange operator Coinbase Global and South Korean e-commerce startup Coupang, have already cashed in on the record run in U.S. capital markets this year.
Unicorns such as electric-vehicle startup Rivian and Microsoft-backed DataBricks are also set to go public later in 2021.
Started in 2005 in Romania by former Microsoft executive Daniel Dines, UiPath recorded a surge in demand for its services during the COVID-19 pandemic from businesses shifting to remote working and digitalizing workflows.
The New York-based company reported $607.6 million in revenue in the year ended Jan. 31, 2021, 81% jump year over year.
“It took them ten years to go from zero to a couple million in revenue. And then in five years, they went from a couple to 600 million,” said Rich Wong, partner at Accel who first invested in UiPath in 2017.
The company partnered with Cleveland Clinic, one of the largest hospitals in the United States, to cut the waiting time at drive-thru COVID-19 testing sites from three minutes to around 15 seconds, Dines said.
Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan were the lead underwriters for the IPO.
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