Austin-based video tech infrastructure company Pivot3 says it is seeing customers' timelines slip and decisions get suspended as a result of coronavirus disruptions, and it's trimming its workforce to prepare for the uncertainty ahead.
"We are adjusting the size of our team and staying focused on our core mission," Pivot3 CMO Bruce Milne said in a prepared statement in response to Inno's questions. "We have preserved all key operational aspects of our business so that we can continue to market, sell, service and support customer solutions."
While declining to provide exact numbers, he said on Friday the company notified "a little more than half of our existing global team that their roles had been impacted."
Pivot3 did not respond to Inno's questions about what other measures, such as executive salary reductions, may have been made to reduce the need for layoffs or other reductions. It also didn't respond to questions about severance packages and other assistance to employees impacted by the changes.
"In a situation like this, the responsible approach is to make some strategic and structural changes to our business to preserve resources and to ensure our continued ability to support our customers, who in many cases depend on us for mission-critical deployments," Milne's statement said.
Most of the people impacted were in its Houston, Colorado and global sales and development offices, Milne said via email.
Pivot3, founded in 2002, specializes in intelligent and automated infrastructure solutions used in video surveillance, video analytics and other workloads. Its customers include companies in healthcare, education, transportation, government, gaming and more. It has offices in Austin, Houston, Boulder, Dubai and Mexico City.
The company has raised $273.4 million in funding, with most of that coming before 2016, according to Crunchbase. Its investors have included Runway Growth Capital, S3 Ventures, Argonaut Private Equity, Samsung Ventures and several others.
The company noted that the market environment has put extraordinary strains on all kinds of businesses.
"We also don’t have any clear insight as to how long this will last; while we can be hopeful that it’s short lived, we don’t have that certainty," Milne said.
Pivot3 is part of a wave of companies making major staffing changes as COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, creates widespread market uncertainty. Other Austin companies reporting layoffs include Yonder, OutboundEngine, RigUp, The Guild and DISCO.
