The UiPath to success
Software company set to open office in Houston
A software company that says it’s valued at $7 billion is opening an office in Houston on Thursday as it aims to win customers in the health care and energy sectors by automating their mundane employee tasks.
UiPath of New York creates software to mimic human activity. It performs routine, time-consuming tasks, such as copying data from a PDF and pasting it into an Excel spreadsheet, and allows employees to focus on more important tasks.
“Texas is a very critical place for us because it’s where we have some very large customers and where we see a lot of innovation going on inside our customers,” said Marie Myers, UiPath’s chief financial officer who lives in Houston. “(Oil and gas companies) have had a lot of economic pressure in the past two to three years, so they’ve really had to look at ways to transform.”
Myers, previously the global controller and executive officer at HP, joined UiPath in December. A month later, she consolidated the company’s approximately 20 local employees, who had been working from home, into a small building downtown. They’ve since expanded and built out the space at 114 Main St.
“We have 71 folks here today,” Myers said, “and we’re hiring more every day.”
The company was founded in Romania in 2005 and moved its headquarters to New York in 2018. It has about 3,200 employees across 20 countries.
UiPath has raised more than $1 billion from investors that include CapitalG, the growth equity investment fund of Google’s parent company Alphabet; venture capital firm Accel, which has invested in companies including Facebook, Dropbox and Slack; and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, with a portfolio that includes Amazon, Google, Nest and Spotify.
In Houston, Myers said the company is looking to add health care customers while continuing to grow its oil and gas footprint. Among its energy customers is
the California oil major Chevron, which has about 7,000 Houstonarea employees.
Employees in Chevron’s business unit in Canada were manually going through PDF reports that Canadian energy companies filed with regulators to find data and paste it in Excel spreadsheets for analysis. And since the PDFs come in a wide variety of formats, extracting the data can be a time consuming and error-prone process.
“Every day there are dozens of reports generated at any number of wells and each report can be anywhere from 75 to 300 pages,” Diane Cillis, engineering technologist at Chevron Canada, said in a case study reported by Microsoft. “After we have the reports, employees go through them page by page. The time and resources it takes to do that is phenomenal.”
Chevron has since used a Microsoft artificial intelligence tool and UiPath’s robotic process automation to extract data from the publicly available reports, which has enabled the company to pull data from these reports faster than competitors, meaning it can make decisions more quickly and drive better results.
Susan Davenport, senior vice president of economic development at the Greater Houston Partnership, called UiPath’s Houston expansion a win for the city’s tech sector.
“This company has a gamechanging
technology,” Davenport said in a statement. “Their rapid expansion in Houston validates our position as an attractive market for B2B (business-to-business) companies seeking access to customers and talent.”
Since the start of this year, UiPath has partnered with six local colleges to train students in robotic process automation, which means they’re learning to program the software that mimics human actions. UiPath provides schools with coursework and offers student internships.
This month, the company held its first U.S. hackathon in Houston.
The 36-hour hackathon, which included $10,000 in prizes, challenged students to identify a problem and then create a solution using robotic process automation. One solution was to streamline new patient intake at clinics by automatically filling out medical documents based on PDFs of insurance cards. Another solution would scrape data from Eventbrite, a platform that allows people to create, share, find and attend events, for certain keywords and consolidate upcoming events in a geographic area into one Google calendar.
Myers said it wasn’t a coincidence that the first U.S. hackathon occurred in Houston.
“We think Houston is strong in terms of the colleges and the partnerships that we can form with the universities,” she said.