UiPath laid off about 400 people this week, six months after the AI-software-automation startup raised $568 million, which boosted its valuation to $7 billion. The news was first reported by Nick Ismail of Information Age.
Marie Myers, the company's chief financial officer, who joined in January, is also leaving at the end of the year, UiPath Chief Marketing Officer Bobby Patrick told Business Insider.
Toni Iafrate, UiPath's vice president of global communications, said Myers was leaving "to pursue other opportunities."
Patrick said the changes were part of the company's "desire to move more investment from back-office to customer-facing operations."
"We need to be more customer-focused," he said. "We're too slow to respond on tactical customer needs."
UiPath provides software that helps businesses automate repetitive tasks across a patchwork of applications, a field also known as robotic process automation. The New York-based firm is one of the top companies in this space, according to a survey of IT professionals by IT Central Station.
"We're still experiencing tremendous growth as a company," Patrick said. "We grew our employee base this year alone by 60% and recognize that along the way we had created some inefficiencies in things that impacted our culture."
UiPath had 3,300 employees before the layoffs. Toni Iafrate, UiPath's vice president of global communications, said that even with the job cuts, the company's workforce was still about 50% bigger than at the beginning of the year.
UiPath was founded in Bucharest, Romania, in 2005 and created automation scripts for the IT industry. It pivoted to the robotic-process-automation market in 2012 after a customer told them: "We've been using your software to automate processes. Come take a look."
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