The situation in India is dire. COVID-19 cases continue to set record highs daily, with medical staff in need of urgent supplies to cope with the increasing number of patients.
Our UiPath community and their families are experiencing the impact, too. Each day, we are hearing from employees about the tragic impacts to their families and friends associated with the unprecedented rise of cases. We’re asking ourselves what more we can do as a company to ensure people get the support they need to keep themselves, their families, and their communities healthy and safe.
India is special to UiPath for many reasons. In 2014, several of our co-founders worked for weeks with a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm in India as they became our first customer that set us on the path to robotic process automation (RPA). This drove us to establish our operations in India, our first country expanding out of Romania. Today, we have over 450 employees and contractors in India, hundreds of customers and partners, and the largest number of RPA developers from a single country as part of the UiPath Community.
We decided that we need to urgently help with this crisis. We reached out to health care systems to see if we can help support and fund the delivery of much-needed materials and oxygen to India. Our goal was to find an organization that we could support that can deliver supplies in hours and days versus weeks and months.
Last week, we met Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and Director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy. Leveraging his vast network, Ramanan mobilized OxygenforIndia.org to provide lifesaving medical oxygen for those who need it most.
With oxygen shortages and hospitals getting overwhelmed, OxygenForIndia is solving the last mile delivery. They are getting medical oxygen in the form of cylinders and oxygen concentrators, to people who need it the most prioritized by clinical status. By getting oxygen to people who need the support but do not need hospital care, they are helping save valuable health care resources and open up critical care capacity.
I’d like to thank Tech Mahindra, a great UiPath partner, for their deep support for OxygenForIndia. Through the 2021 Global Emergency Fund against COVID-19 in India, UiPath, the UiPath Foundation, and UiPath employees are providing nearly $1 million to deliver oxygen supplies immediately to India.
A Boeing 747 will deliver supplies this week and next week. Our donation is estimated to provide approximately 5,500 cylinders or nearly 200,000 hours of oxygen through the 2021 Global Emergency Fund against COVID-19 to the communities in India that need it the most. Of course, there is much more urgently needed.
I am hopeful that the situation will improve in India, but we also know that hope is not enough. We encourage you and the organizations you are a part of to join us by donating to OxygenforIndia.org. We’ll get through this unprecedented time together.
