Romania-born tech unicorn UiPath, the biggest robotic processing automation (RPA) company in the world, has announced it will lay off about 400 employees (one in eight of its current employees) as part of a global process of “reorganising its functions”.

UiPath, now headquartered in New York, is Romania’s standout tech success. After its latest $568mn round of funding in April, the company  announced that its valuation had reached $7bn. It was already among the select group of international startups whose valuations had passed the $1bn mark, dubbed tech “unicorns”. Among its backers are tech-focussed hedge fund Coatue, Wellington, Sands Capital, Accel, CapitalG and Sequoia. 

Globally, UiPath has more than 3,200 employees, of which 1,000 work at its headquarters in Bucharest.

After international media reports about the layoffs, CEO Daniel Dines confirmed the reorganisation in a blog post on October 24. “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,” he wrote. “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.”

As part of the reorganisation, CFO Marie Myers will leave the company after she joined it at the beginning of the year.

Dines has sought to assure investors of the company’s future. Just days before the layoffs were announced he told a Las Vegas event to mark the launch of a new generation of software robots that his company is getting a new customer every 90 seconds.

However, there have recently been reports of heavy spending by UiPath. Romanian daily Ziarul Financiar quotes internal sources saying that the company is spending cash at a speed that is "significantly higher than at any other RPA company”.

It recently announced the acquisitions of startups StepShot and ProcessGold, and the Las Vegas event cost an estimated $8mn. On top of that Romanian media have reported that UiPath has been splashing out on Aeron chairs made by famous American office equipment producer Herman Miller for its employees in Romania. 

UiPath has signed a contract with local company Workspace Studio, a leading provider of office furniture in Romania, to supply the chairs. According to Workspace Studio, UiPath has acquired some 600-700 Aeron chairs so far and will continue buying them until all of the 1,000 employees who work in the Bucharest office have the chairs.

The chairs retail at €1,500, and while the price is likely lower for large volumes, they are still estimated to cost over €1,000 each, which would bring the total to over €1mn — a negligible expense compared to the  company’s €7bn estimated value, but still a large amount for chairs.