Cybersecurity Firm Lacework Discloses Layoffs Amid Economic Fear

Lacework, a well-funded cybersecurity startup, has become the latest tech company to announce a large round of layoffs amid fears of a broader economic slump. The corporation did not say how many employees were affected in total. Lacework had over 1,000 employees in March, following a $1.3 billion fundraising round in November at an $8.3 billion value.

Lacework stated in a statement that 20% of its staff were laid off as part of a "determination to restructure the business."

The corporation did not say how many people were laid off in total. It had previously stated that it employed over 1,000 people.

A Lacework spokesperson said that a statistic for the overall number of layoffs released on Twitter yesterday was "much overestimated."

In a blog post yesterday, the cloud security vendor wrote, "Today, we made the very difficult decision to say goodbye to some of our colleagues, as part of a restructuring and modification to the company plan."

Since its inception in 2014, Lacework has raised $1.85 billion in investment, the majority of which was revealed in 2021. The company announced a $525 million investment round in January 2021, followed by a $1.3 billion round in November 2021, with an $8.3 billion value.

According to CB Insights, Lacework ranks third in terms of the largest values for privately-held security companies, and the fundraising was dubbed "the largest funding round in security industry history."

According to the corporation, its customer base will increase by 3.5X in 2021. Lacework went on a recruiting binge last year, jumping from 200 people in January 2021 to over 1,000 by March, thanks to the significant funding and rapid expansion of the firm.

Lacework offers a "data-driven" service that collects and analyses data from across a customer's cloud settings to stand out in the fast-growing cloud security market. According to the company, the purpose is to provide customers with critical security information, such as which threats should be prioritised for action.

The services supported by the Lacework platform are AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Kubernetes (Amazon EKS). VMware, Snowflake, and Pure Storage are among the previously revealed customers.

Lacework is also remarkable for being the third business to emerge from Sutter Hill Ventures' incubator, following in the footsteps of Pure Storage and Snowflake. Hatfield, the former president of Pure Storage, and Parikh, the former vice president of engineering at Facebook, lead the company.

Source: Protocol

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