Last week, reports surfaced that RPA technology provider UiPath, after several years of explosive growth, would lay off up to 400 employees. As a leading company in a nascent industry, that the news set off tremors was understandable. Some coverage of the announcement raised questions about the health of the industry, in general.
A day after the first reports emerged, UiPath founder and CEO Daniel Dines took to the company’s corporate blog to issue a statement to explain the layoffs. Dines called the move a response to “blazing” growth and tried to reassure the industry, investors, customers and the public of UiPath’s health.
“Through the waves of our recent hiring, we have worried that we could become less agile and responsive to customers,” Dines wrote. “Over the last few weeks, I have asked our teams to dive deeper into their operations. In some cases, we identified opportunities to streamline, such as combining our partner sales and direct sales teams in every region. We are also shifting investments from back-office to customer-facing operations. While this is largely about improving our customer experience, it is also about improving efficiency; a necessary step as we mature our business.”
Dines acknowledged that the layoff was “a tough call,” but necessary to keep the company on a “path to profitability in 2020.”