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.
Rather than being an outlier, UiPath may yet be a trailblazer for a new wave of software companies that can emerge from anywhere and sell to anyone. It is now taken as read that the world has entered an era of deglobalisation as national tensions rise and global supply chains fragment. But in parts of the digital world, at least, the exact opposite is true: we are seeing the rapid acceleration of e-globalisation.