AI platform 6Sense lays off 150 employees globally, including several from India
US-based artificial intelligence (AI) platform 6Sense has laid off close to 150 employees or 10 percent of its workforce globally, including many from its India offices in Bengaluru and Pune, according to people aware of the matter.
The layoffs have happened over last three to four days across content, design, video editing, product, sales, marketing and engineering teams, the people said, requesting anonymity. Employees were told about it on a 15-minute Zoom call which had their respective managers and someone from the HR (Human Resources) team, they added.
“On Thursday I was asked to join a Zoom call. The call had my manager and an HR person,” said an employee requesting anonymity.
“I wasn’t expecting this at all. Tech, product and engineering folks had an offsite in Dubai next week (October 17-21) and we have our tickets. Now are told we can’t attend it as we are laid off. This was totally unexpected,” the employee said.
As a part of a severance package, employees have been offered to encash their privilege leaves. Employees were told uncertain macroeconomic environment as the reason for layoffs. The third quarter of 2022 was bad for the company, just as it was bad for all SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies and so they had to do this to cut costs, the employee quoted above said.
Questions sent to 6Sense did not elicit an immediate response. The copy will be updated with comments from the company.
6Sense, a Y Combinator-backed company, counts Tiger Global, Bain Capital, Insight Partners, SalesForce Ventures, SoftBank, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital, among others as its backers. The company has raised over $420 million to date and is valued at $5.2 billion currently, according to data from Tracxn. It last raised a $200 million round in January this year.
The company’s platform captures anonymous buying signals, targets the right accounts at the ideal time, and recommends the channels and messages to boost revenue performance. It was founded in 2013 by Amanda Kahlow, Dustin Chang, Premal Shah, Shane Moriah and Viral Bajaria and has offices in San Francisco, Austin, New York City, London apart from Pune and Bengaluru.
In October last year, 6Sense had bought Slintel, a Bengaluru and California based business-to-business SaaS market intelligence platform. Slintel has about 200 employees, who all joined 6Sense post the acquisition.6Sense joins a growing list of technology companies across the world to undertake mass layoffs as funding to the sector is drying up amid a correction in global financial markets. In India alone, technology startups have laid off over 15,000 employees since the start of 2022. Globally, close to 90,000 employees have been laid off by 681 tech startups, according to Layoffs.Fyi, a layoff tracker.