UiPath Layoffs: 400 Lose Jobs Despite Startup Hitting $7 Billion Valuation

UiPath has laid off 400 employees even after the company's valuation topped $7 billion in April owing to the $568 million raised in a Series D funding round.

The New York-based software company is burning heavy cash in its push to build more hype around robotic process automation (RPA). It is estimated that the company had about 3,000 employees before the mass firing, and more job cuts could be underway.

Among the hundreds of people the company sacked is their Chief Financial Officer, Marie Myers, who left Hewlett Packard (HP) as Global Controller just a year before.

"It's natural that we evaluate our teams and internal investments from time to time. In this case, we have made the decision to trim back in areas that don't align with our current business focus," a spokesperson from UiPath told Information Age.

"This has impacted less than 400 employees globally. But even with these changes, we have 50% more employees than on January 1, 2019."

The layoffs also came after an extravagant event held in Las Vegas last week. The "Forward" convention stood at a budget of $8 million.

UiPath is a company founded in Romania by Chief Executive Daniel Dines and Chief Technology Officer Marius Tirca. The company develops an RPA platform to automate repetitive tasks across applications like its Enterprise RPA platform, which serves companies in creating an "automated virtual workforce."

Some of the company's competitors are Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, WorkFusion, and Nice.

Dines told Forbes that UiPath's revenue was "nearly $200 million in 2018." He also emphasized their investors' estimation of their company's growth since 2015. This was the same time when the company was fresh from the half-billion funding round from investors Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group, Wellington Partners, and Sands Capital Ventures.

However, the company seems to be running out of funds to cover its cost, but Chief Marketing Officer Bobby Patrick believes otherwise.

"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."