Outbrain Inc., an Israeli firm that offers content recommendations to businesses, is laying off about ten percent of its workforce in a sign that Israel Startup Nation is not yet out of the woods when it comes to business woes caused by the worldwide financial crisis. And SentinelOne, an Israeli cybersecurity firm, is laying off about 100 people, or 5% of its total worldwide workforce. The move comes as the company lost 35% of its share value after reporting a loss of $106.9 million.
Founded in 2013 by a team of cybersecurity and defense experts, SentinelOne is a provider of autonomous security solutions for endpoint, cloud, and identity environments. The company says its platform unifies prevention, detection, response, remediation, and forensics in a single, easy-to-use solution.
“Our company is strong and growing rapidly. But like any other company, we operate in a particularly challenging environment,” SentinalOne said in a statement about the cutbacks. “To maintain growth and ensure we are on the road to profitability, we must adjust expenses and channel resources to focus on high-priority initiatives that will allow us to meet our long-term needs and those of our customers and partners. Against this background, we are implementing a plan to cut approximately 5% – less than 100 employees – of our global workforce, while adjusting the pace of employee recruitment to growth-oriented prioritization.”
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As for its losses, the company said, “Macroeconomic pressures continue to impact deal sizes, sales cycles, and pipeline conversion rates. While not entirely new, the impact of these factors was more pronounced in Q1. Together, these evolving dynamics also impacted our expectations for Q2 and fiscal year 24.”
As for Outbrain, the company has lost most of its value since a 2022 IPO left it with a $1.2 billion valuation. The company now has a valuation of just $236 million.
Outbrain boasts that provides more than a billion unique users worldwide with individually tailored content recommendations. The company says that it provides 344 billion content recommendations per month on the Internet. Outbrain reported revenue of $228 million in Q1 2021.
Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav founded Outbrain in 2006 to solve the problem publishers had in replicating the print experience of turning a page to discover the next article or product on the web. Outbrain calls itself the leading recommendation platform for the open web. Its technology enables one-third of the world’s online consumers to discover new things through recommendation feeds on their favorite media and connects advertisers to these audiences to grow their businesses. Today, Outbrain develops recommendation technology that makes the act of exploring and discovering new things on the open web possible.
“Today we shared some difficult news with the company’s employees when we decided to say goodbye to about 10% of Outbrain’s global workforce,” Outbrain said in a statement. “The past year has brought with it rapid changes in the industry and sector, including reductions in personnel. In light of this, we have taken several steps to streamline the company’s operations, which will give us the tools to continue to lead the industry and invest in our targeted growth engines.