Romania, a “Silicon Valley” in the heart of Eastern Europe? Le Monde Report
What is happening in Romania according to the French newspaper Le Monde
With the success of the IPO on Wall Street of the pearl UiPath, specialized in artificial intelligence, the spotlight has turned on the IT ecosystem and on Romanian talents – writes Le Monde
In a world run by robots, everyone will have to own one. This is what Daniel Dines, founder of the Romanian "unicorn" UiPath, launched on Wall Street on April 21, thinks. “A robot for all” is the slogan of this start-up specialized in the automation of processes through robotics (APR), now valued at 40 billion dollars (33 billion euros). Nothing foreshadowed that the small Romanian company, which was granted the first loan in 2015, would become the number one in the world in terms of innovation in artificial intelligence a few years later.
Forget the modest apartment in Bucharest where the business with a small team of young computer scientists started. Today, UiPath has offices in New York, London, Paris and Mumbai (India). Its creator, Daniel Dines, 49, belongs to the generation that cut its teeth in the Internet boom of the 1990s, which gave birth to Google, for example. Hired by Microsoft in the early 2000s, Dines encountered difficulties in adapting to the constraints of a large company: he left the American company and, in 2005, returned to Romania with the dream of creating a company capable of change. the world.
“There is a key moment in everyone's life,” he says. He founded DeskOver, renamed UiPath in 2015, together with a friend, Marius Tirca. “Ever since I was a kid, I've always hated doing repetitive things, and I thought: it would be nice to have an assistant. Hence the idea that every person should have a robot, ”he told a conference in 2020. In 2015, the small team got its first funding. And Daniel Dines is now the richest Romanian, with an estimated fortune of over $ 7 billion.
It was 2001 when Romania made a big leap in the field of new technologies, thanks to the success of the cybersecurity company Bitdefender. “Although it may seem paradoxical today, Romanian IT experienced a significant development during the Communist era,” explains Florin Talpes, CEO of Bitdefender. “This phenomenon continued after the fall of the dictatorship. About 10,000 young computer scientists graduate from universities each year. Regarding their number, Romania occupies one of the first places in the world. "
Romania is now often regarded as the "new Silicon Valley of Europe", thanks to the success of UiPath and Bitdefender. Every year, thousands of start-ups emerge from incubators across the country. In 2018, two brothers, Beniamin and Lucian Mincu, created a startup in Sibiu, a small town in the center of the country, specializing in blockchain technology. Today, their business, Elrond, has attracted € 3 billion in capital. "Money is no longer a problem for us," admits Beniamin Mincu. "Our goal is to reach 1 billion users". "
Billions of euros, billions of users, the young Romanians of Elrond think big. Gone are the days when their country was lagging behind the European Union. The Internet has erased borders and new technologies allow them to launch on international markets. Their history is repeated throughout Romania, where small groups of young people believe in their luck and start their business before going to university. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this transformation.
Aware of this effervescence, French Tech, the French showcase for start-ups in France, opened its branch in Bucharest in June 2020 with the idea of creating a bridge between young French and Romanian entrepreneurs. “Romania has more computer engineers per capita than the United States, France, Germany, China or India,” says Grégoire Vigroux, the president of French Tech Bucharest.
A success that did not go unnoticed in Brussels: on 9 December 2020, the 27 member countries decided that Romania will host the new European Cybersecurity Competence Center. It is in this context that the Romanian authorities want to encourage young people who have left to study in the West to return to their country of origin. The “RePatriot” program uses European funds to finance the return of expatriates through entrepreneurship. Each start-up created in Romania by young people from the diaspora will receive 100,000 euros in funding.
(Extract from the Epr review)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/romania-silicon-valley-europa-est/ on Sun, 30 May 2021 06:00:04 +0000.