Israeli software firm Salto – which counts Salesforce among its investors – has laid off 50% of its staff.
The company, which develops an enterprise business application DevOps platform, cut 30 employees as part of a restructuring plan, CTech reports. Their DevOps offering provided a single platform for deploying enterprise business applications like Salesforce, NetSuite, Zendesk, and Jira.
Salto Layoffs Explained
Salto raised $27M in Series A funding and then, less than seven months later, in May 2021, completed a $42M round of funding.
Investors in the company include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel, and Salesforce Ventures.
Salto said in a statement: “About half of our employees continue to work on our existing product, while others are focused on developing a new offering in the cybersecurity space.
“Through our operations, we identified a major opportunity to apply our core technology to solve critical challenges in cybersecurity.
“Based on this insight, we’re preparing to launch a new product under a new brand in the near future. While maintaining high-quality service for our existing users, we’re rebuilding the company to support accelerated growth in the security market.”
Salto’s founders, Rami Tamir, Benny Schnaider, and Gil Hoffer, have found success with a number of other ventures, including Pentacom, which was acquired by Cisco; Ravello Systems, which was bought by Oracle; and Qumranet, which was bought by Red Hat.
Salesforce Ben has been reporting this year on what appears to be a trend of layoffs in the tech sector – with artificial intelligence often cited as one of the causes.
Salesforce Ben has contacted Salto for comment.
Final Thoughts
While having a single platform to deploy different enterprise applications was an innovative approach, Salto’s Salesforce offering might have been a little too generic. This highlights a possibility that the Salesforce ecosystem rewards specialist tools that solve pain points better than Salesforce’s own products.
While these layoffs were not due to AI, it seems inarguable at this point – in my opinion – that the Salesforce and SaaS ecosystems, along with the entire tech industry, are feeling the pressure from automation and ever-shifting priorities.
A pivot to cybersecurity seems like it might be a wise move, especially given recent developments in that sphere.
