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UiPath

Founders

Who Founded UiPath?

Daniel Dines, Marius Tîrcă · Founded 2005 · HQ today: New York, NY, USA

Who founded UiPath?

UiPath was founded by Daniel Dines, Marius Tîrcă in 2005 in Bucharest, Romania. It is now led by Daniel Dines.

Founders
Daniel Dines, Marius Tîrcă
Founded
2005
Headquarters
New York, NY, USA
Number of founders
2
Current CEO
Daniel Dines (since 2005)
Where was UiPath founded?
UiPath was founded in Bucharest, Romania in 2005. wikidata.org
When was UiPath founded?
UiPath was founded in 2005.
Who started UiPath?
UiPath was founded by Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă.
How old is UiPath?
UiPath is 21 years old as of 2026.

Founding Story

Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă started the business in Bucharest in 2005 under the name DeskOver. For several years it sold automation and screen-scraping libraries to other software developers. Around 2013 the founders saw that outsourcing customers were using those libraries to automate repetitive desktop work, and they refocused the company on robotic process automation. The company renamed itself UiPath in 2015, raised venture funding from investors including Accel, CapitalG and Sequoia, moved its headquarters to New York, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2021.

Background

Dines worked as a software developer at Microsoft in the United States before returning to Romania. That engineering background shaped UiPath's early product, which was built on screen-automation and UI-recognition libraries.

Role at UiPath

Daniel Dines is a Romanian software engineer who co-founded the company that became UiPath in Bucharest in 2005. He led the shift from developer libraries to robotic process automation, took the company public on the NYSE in April 2021, and returned as sole CEO in June 2024 after a period as co-CEO and Chief Innovation Officer.

Daniel Dines was born in 1972 in Onești.

Daniel Solomon Dines was born in January 1972 and is Romanian.

Background

Romanian software engineer.

Role at UiPath

Marius Tîrcă co-founded UiPath in 2005 alongside Daniel Dines. As the absolutely critical technical genius behind the platform, he spent nearly a decade in obscurity building the highly robust, deeply complex screen-scraping and computer vision algorithms that eventually formed the core of UiPath's massive robotic automation software. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

UiPath: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Rob Enslin

Co-CEO, then Chief Executive Officer

2022 – 2024

Recruited from Google Cloud, he served briefly as Co-CEO, bringing absolutely critical enterprise sales discipline to the hyper-growth startup before abruptly resigning in 2024.

Daniel Dines

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

2005 – Present

Led UiPath from a small Bucharest software shop to a public company with $1.6 billion in annual revenue. He was co-CEO from 2022 and Chief Innovation Officer in early 2024 before returning as CEO.

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Who Founded UiPath? FAQ

Who were the founders of UiPath?

UiPath was founded in 2005 by Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă, two Romanian software engineers who began their collaboration in Bucharest.

What was Daniel Dines' background prior to founding DeskOver?

Daniel Dines was born in 1972 in Onești, Romania, and studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Bucharest. He worked at software firms in Romania before moving to the US to work at Microsoft in Redmond from 2001 to 2005.

Why did Daniel Dines leave Microsoft in 2005 to return to Romania?

Craving entrepreneurial independence and wishing to return home, Dines left a comfortable career at Microsoft in 2005 to establish an outsourced software development firm in Bucharest with friends.

Who is Marius Tîrcă and what was his technical contribution to UiPath?

Marius Tîrcă is a brilliant Romanian software engineer and co-founder who served as Chief Technology Officer and Head of Engineering. He spent nearly a decade writing the underlying optical character recognition (OCR) and screen-scraping algorithms that made UiPath's automation engine so reliable.

What were the working conditions during the early years in Bucharest (2005–2013)?

The founders and a team of 10 engineers worked out of a cramped rented apartment in Bucharest, surviving on meager outsourcing contracts and selling developer SDKs while struggling to find commercial product-market fit.

How did the breakthrough customer in 2013 change the founders' lives?

In 2013, an Indian BPO company revealed it was using DeskOver's automation libraries to eliminate human data-entry tasks for client accounting. The founders realized they were sitting on a multi-billion-dollar enterprise automation technology and pivoted 100% of their resources to RPA.

How did the founders finance the company before institutional venture capital?

DeskOver was entirely bootstrapped for ten years on internal software library sales before raising a $1.6 million seed round in 2015 from Earlybird and Credo Ventures.

What was Marius Tîrcă's role as the company scaled into a global giant?

Marius Tîrcă led engineering architecture and later served as Chief Innovation Officer and VP of Enterprise Engineering, ensuring software stability through UiPath's transition from desktop tools to cloud SaaS.

What cultural philosophy did the founders instill across UiPath?

They instilled an emphasis on humility, intellectual honesty, transparent feedback, and listening to customer engineers rather than pretending to have all the answers.

How did the success of the founders transform Romania's startup ecosystem?

UiPath's multi-billion-dollar success created dozens of Romanian angel investors, funded local university STEM programs, inspired a generation of Eastern European founders, and established Bucharest as a premier software hub.

What philanthropic initiatives have the founders supported?

Daniel Dines created the Dines Family Foundation, which funds education, environmental preservation, and arts initiatives in Romania, as well as supporting underprivileged children through educational access programs.

What was the founders' ultimate technological conviction?

Their unwavering conviction that boring, repetitive manual computer work degrades human potential, and that software robots should liberate human workers to focus on creative, strategic, and empathetic problem-solving.

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Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.