Cloud security unicorn Lacework cut 20% of its workforce, which was translated as “​​some difficult news” by executives on the vendor's website and comes just 6 months after the firm closed a $1.3 billion funding round. 

“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,” Lacework co-CEOs David Hatfield and Jay Parikh wrote to the Lacework community. The company earlier this year said it employed more than 1,000 people.  

Lacework late last year announced a then record-breaking $1.3 billion funding round, which pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion. CFO Mike Staiger told SDxCentral in an earlier interview that one of the plans for the funding was to grow its workforce.

“Certainly the amount of the financing, $1.3 billion, is unprecedented in the security space, and so we’re excited to have had such a large bet placed on us in this space,” Staiger said then. “We want to build big, fast-moving teams in all of these geographies, and that requires a significant investment.”

However, in this week's letter, the CEO duo explained that “over the past several weeks and months, a seismic shift has occurred in both the public and private markets. While we do not have control of the environment around us, we do have a responsibility to control how we operate our business and make changes as needed to best position the company for continued and long-term success.”

“We have adjusted our plan to increase our cash runway through to profitability and significantly strengthened our balance sheet so we can be more opportunistic around investment opportunities and weather uncertainty in the macro environment,” they added. “We remain 100% committed to continued best-in-class growth and leading the industry with our innovation.” 

Lacework developed a cloud security platform that provides several capabilities including cloud security posture management, vulnerability scanning, cloud-workload protection, threat detection and response, runtime and build-time threat defense, and identity and access management across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes- and container-based environments.