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Leaders
November 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 6
spinning the developed AI solutions abroad. The representative of the fund reminded to Vedomosti that the fund had already raised $2bn for Russian AI developers.
In a separate report Vedomosti and RBC business daily said that Sberbank launched a most powerful supercomputer in Russia, 7th most powerful in Europe and 29th most powerful in Europe.
The supercomputer was developed jointly with the US company Nvidia, and is named Christofari
Tech unicorn Uipath announces layoffs after media reveal €1mn spending spree on designer chairs
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
in the honour of first ever client of Sber Kassa (Sovier predecessor of Sberbank) Nikolai Christofari. The cost of the development is not disclosed, and the bank plans to use the machine in the development of AI-based services.
Christofari is already used in voice recognition and automated client services of Sberbank.
The bank will also outsource the capacity of the supercomputer to third parties for a fee starting with December.
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.