UiPath

Stripe

UiPath

UiPath sells software licenses and cloud subscriptions for its automation platform. Pricing is based on the number of software robots (called "attended" and "unattended" robots) deployed plus platform fees for orchestration and management tools.

The land-and-expand model works well. A company might start with 5 robots automating invoice processing, then expand to 50 robots handling HR onboarding, then 500 robots across the entire organization.

Revenue per customer grows as automation spreads through departments.

Annual recurring revenue exceeded $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2025. The shift from on-premise licenses to cloud subscriptions has been a major focus, with cloud ARR growing faster than overall revenue.

Professional services and training (UiPath Academy) generate additional revenue.

Stripe

Stripe charges a flat 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. That's it.

No setup fees, no monthly fees, no hidden charges. The simplicity is the product.

When a customer pays on a website using Stripe, Stripe handles everything — fraud detection, currency conversion, bank transfers, tax calculation, compliance. The merchant just sees money arrive in their account.

On top of the core payments, Stripe has built an entire financial infrastructure stack. Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplace payments, Atlas for incorporating a company, Issuing for creating virtual cards, Treasury for banking-as-a-service, and Radar for fraud prevention.

They're basically building the financial plumbing for the entire internet.

UiPath

Daniel Dines grew up in communist Romania and taught himself to code as a teenager. After working at Microsoft in Seattle for several years, he returned to Bucharest in 2005 and started a small software company called DeskOver with Marius Tîrcă.

Their initial product was an SDK — a software library that let developers build automation scripts for Windows applications.

For nearly a decade, DeskOver (later renamed UiPath) survived as a tiny bootstrapped company selling development tools. Dines ran the operation from a small apartment in Bucharest with a handful of employees.

Revenue was modest — enough to keep the lights on but not enough to grow. The company was unknown outside a niche developer community.

The pivot came around 2013-2015 when Dines noticed that large enterprises were spending billions on outsourcing repetitive digital tasks — copying data from one system to another, processing invoices, updating spreadsheets. He repositioned UiPath from a developer tool into an enterprise RPA platform: software "robots" that could mimic human actions on a computer screen.

Click this button. Copy that field.

Paste it here. Send that email.

The timing was perfect — every large company had thousands of employees doing exactly this kind of work.

Stripe

Patrick Collison was 19. His brother John was 17.

They had already built and sold a company — Auctomatic, an eBay auction tool — for $5 million while still teenagers in Limerick, Ireland. Patrick went to MIT, John went to Harvard, and they both dropped out because they had a better idea.

The idea was embarrassingly obvious in hindsight. In 2010, accepting payments on the internet was a nightmare.

You had to get a merchant account, negotiate with a payment processor, deal with a gateway provider, handle PCI compliance, and write thousands of lines of code. It took weeks or months.

The Collisons thought it should take five minutes.

They built a simple API — seven lines of code — that let any developer start accepting credit card payments immediately. No merchant account.

No paperwork. No phone calls with banks.

Just paste seven lines of code and you're in business. They originally called it /dev/payments, then changed it to Stripe in 2011.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — the PayPal mafia — were among the first investors. Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz piled in soon after.

The Collisons had built exactly what every developer on Earth had been wishing for.

UiPath

UiPath grew through a community-first strategy. UiPath Academy offered free training and certification, creating hundreds of thousands of developers who knew the platform before their employers bought it.

When those developers advocated for UiPath internally, the sales team had warm leads.

The free Community Edition let individual developers and small teams use UiPath at no cost. This bottoms-up adoption mirrored the playbook of Slack and Atlassian — get individual users hooked, then sell enterprise licenses to the organization.

Partners and system integrators drove enterprise deals. Deloitte, Accenture, EY, and PwC all built RPA practices around UiPath, recommending it to their enterprise clients.

These consulting firms had existing relationships with every Fortune 500 CIO, and they directed automation budgets toward UiPath.

Stripe

Stripe grew almost entirely through developer love. They didn't hire a sales team for years.

They didn't run ads. They just built the best developer documentation anyone had ever seen and let word of mouth do the rest.

The developer-first strategy was deliberate. The Collisons realized that in a startup, the developer usually decides which payment provider to use.

If you make the developer happy, you win the company. Stripe's API documentation became legendary — clear, beautiful, with working code examples in every language.

They also grew by growing with their customers. Early Stripe customers included tiny startups that later became giants — Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Shopify.

As those companies scaled to billions in revenue, Stripe's processing volume scaled with them. Stripe didn't need to acquire new customers because its existing ones kept getting bigger.

The international expansion was methodical. Instead of launching everywhere at once like Uber, Stripe carefully added country after country, making sure each one worked perfectly with local payment methods, currencies, and regulations.

By 2024 they were processing payments in 195 countries.

UiPath

AI threatens to leapfrog RPA entirely. Traditional RPA automates repetitive, rule-based tasks by mimicking human clicks.

But generative AI and large language models can understand context, handle exceptions, and process unstructured data — potentially replacing the need for screen-scraping robots. If AI agents can directly interact with APIs and databases, the "robot that clicks buttons" approach may become obsolete.

Competition from Microsoft is the most dangerous threat. Microsoft Power Automate is bundled into Microsoft 365, which virtually every enterprise already pays for.

Offering "good enough" automation for free inside a suite companies already use is devastating for a standalone RPA vendor charging premium prices.

Growth has decelerated. After explosive growth during COVID (when every company rushed to automate), UiPath's revenue growth slowed significantly.

The stock dropped over 80% from its all-time high. CEO Daniel Dines stepped back as CEO in 2023 (Rob Enslin took over, then left, and Dines returned in 2024), creating leadership instability at a critical moment.

Stripe

Valuation whiplash. In 2021, Stripe hit a peak valuation of $95 billion during the fintech boom.

By 2023, they had to mark it down to $50 billion during the tech correction — a 47% drop that made headlines everywhere. Employees who had been paper millionaires suddenly weren't.

The valuation has since recovered to $91 billion after a secondary share sale in 2025, but those two years were rough for morale.

Competition is relentless. Adyen, the Dutch payments company, has been eating into Stripe's enterprise market.

Square (now Block) competes on the small business side. PayPal is everywhere.

New fintech players pop up constantly. The payments business has razor-thin margins and everyone is fighting for the same 2.9%.

Going public is the elephant in the room. Stripe has been expected to IPO for years.

Investors, employees, and the media keep asking when. The Collisons have consistently said they're in no rush, but with $8.7 billion raised and thousands of employees holding stock options, the pressure to provide liquidity is enormous.

As of 2025, they've opted for secondary sales instead of a public offering.

UiPath

UiPath Studio — the development environment where automation workflows are designed using a visual drag-and-drop interface. No coding required for basic automations.

UiPath Robots — the software agents that execute automated workflows, either alongside human workers (attended) or independently (unattended) on virtual machines. UiPath Orchestrator — the centralized management platform for deploying, monitoring, scheduling, and scaling thousands of robots across an organization.

UiPath Autopilot — an AI-powered assistant that uses generative AI to help users build automations through natural language descriptions. UiPath Document Understanding — AI models that extract data from unstructured documents like invoices, contracts, and forms.

Stripe

Stripe Payments is the core — accept credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and 135+ payment methods in 195 countries. Stripe Connect lets marketplaces and platforms pay out to sellers (Shopify, Lyft, DoorDash all use it).

Stripe Billing handles subscription and recurring billing. Stripe Atlas lets you incorporate a US company from anywhere in the world — fill out a form, get a Delaware C-corp, bank account, and tax ID in days.

Stripe Radar uses machine learning to block fraud in real time. Stripe Treasury lets platforms offer banking services to their customers.

Stripe Tax automatically calculates and collects sales tax in every jurisdiction.

UiPath

Accel led the Series A in 2017 — the first major venture investment after a decade of bootstrapping. CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund), Sequoia Capital, and IVP participated in later rounds.

Dragoneer, Tiger Global, Alkeon Capital, and Coatue Management invested in the 2019-2021 growth rounds. The April 2021 IPO raised $1.3 billion at a $36 billion valuation.

Stripe

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, GV (Google Ventures), Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford