Romania was once a benighted corner of communism, a country of power cuts, queues and near-empty shops stocked only with “jars of pickled indescribables”, to quote a colleague who was there at the time.
That makes it all the more striking that this week UiPath, a Bucharest-born, venture capital-backed software company that promises to make global capitalist corporations hum more efficiently, raised further funding in New York at a nosebleed $35bn valuation.