Hot automation startup UiPath brings on a veteran exec who was at Microsoft for over 20 to help scale its business ahead of a potential IPO next year

• UiPath is bringing on industry veteran Ted Kummert as its new executive president of product and engineering.
• Kummert - who spent nearly 25 years at Microsoft and was most recently chief product officer and partner at Madrona Venture Group - will be in charge of helping the robotic process automation startup scale its business.
• In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, Kummert said he sees the role "as an opportunity to continue to build one of the most significant enterprises in the cloud era."
• While the company had a rocky 2019 that included hundreds of layoffs, it still has momentum ahead of an expected initial public offering as early as next year.
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UiPath's main goal in 2020 is growth - and it's bringing on a nearly 25-year veteran of Microsoft to help achieve that.

On Tuesday, the company will name industry veteran Ted Kummert as its new executive vice president of product and engineering.

Kummert was most recently the chief product officer and partner at Madrona Venture Group, which invested in UiPath. Prior to that, he served as a corporate vice president at Microsoft, where he led a team of over 2,400 engineers responsible for developing the business products available on the software giant's application platform.

At UiPath, Kummert plans to help build on the success the company has had to-date with its robotic process automation platform - one that helps businesses automate common, repetitive, and mundane computer tasks - ahead of a potential initial public offering as soon as early next year.

"I see this as an opportunity to continue to build one of the most significant enterprises in the cloud-era," he told Business Insider. "I see an incredible amount of momentum for us to capitalize on. There's a vision for a very broad platform here."

Moving on past layoffs

Kummert is joining UiPath at a time when the startup is bouncing back from a rocky 2019. The company started the year off with an eye-popping $568 million funding round, but then it stunned the tech industry by suddenly announcing that it was cutting about 400 jobs - a decision one executive labeled a "natural part of its evolution."

But it ended 2019 on a high-note.

In the fourth-quarter, privately-held UiPath said that it had achieved annual recurring revenue of $360 million - up from $3 million just three years ago. The metric is an important one, executives say, because the company's products are offered as a subscription to corporations.

UiPath is adding 13 new enterprise clients each day, according to chief financial officer Ashim Gupta. Current customers include Amazon, Cleveland Clinic, and the United States Department of Agriculture. And the amount of deals that crossed the million-dollar-mark have tripled since 2018. Now, over 40 customers have agreements in place that are above that threshold.

The road to continued growth, however, is likely to get more challenging. Microsoft and fellow software behemoth SAP are both rolling-out their own RPA-platforms, offerings that could put pressure on UiPath's goal of finding more enterprise clients.

And it will fall on Kummert to help navigate those headwinds.

"This is one of the most attractive, largest-growing markets in the enterprise. I think we are going to see lots of competition come-and-go," he said.

One of the challenges for Kummert is keeping the company focused on core offerings, while making sure it succeeds in the new areas it invests in. "Maintaining that focus and excellence as your team grows and as the surface area of your product continues to grow" is always hard, he said.

It's an area where Kummert's over two-decade long tenure at Microsoft will come in handy.

"I'm carrying forward...how you build great products, focusing on customers and the market needs, [and] how you build and scale great engineering and product teams," he said.