Oakland-based Teleport announced a round of layoffs on Friday that would impact a small portion of the team as its CEO took responsibility for “chasing growth at all costs.”
Co-founder and CEO Ev Kontsevoy revealed the layoffs in a blog post on Friday.
“Why did this happen? This happened because I got caught up chasing growth at all costs. When it comes to revenue growth, Teleport has been on a roll lately, and the capital markets rewarded us handsomely. In that pursuit of growth, I did not press our leadership team to focus enough on efficient growth,” Kontsevoy wrote. ”As the economic situation has changed and efficiency is now the focus, we had no choice but to make this adjustment. I am sorry.”
The company confirmed to the Business Times that it had 230 employees in June and that the layoffs will impact 15 people, or 6% of its total workforce, on its recruiting team in anticipation of slowing down hiring this year. However, it is not implementing a hiring freeze, Kontsevoy told me via email.
"These layoffs were about realignment, not stopping growth," Kontsevoy said. "Teleport has many years of runway without requiring additional capital and the company is still growing, hiring and innovating."
Teleport provides “zero trust” security infrastructure for businesses which adds multiple layers of identity authentication checks for all users in a network.
Kontsevoy co-founded the company in 2015 with COO Taylor Wakefield and CTO Alexander Klizhentas.
They raised a $110 million Series C in May in a round that nearly tripled the company's valuation to $1.1 billion from $380 million less than one year ago, according to PitchBook.
Its investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Active Capital, Catapult VC, Kleiner Perkins, Fort Ventures, SV Angel and Y Combinator. And the company says its customers include Elastic, Samsung, NASDAQ and IBM.
Teleport has nearly two dozen job openings listed on LinkedIn, primarily for engineering roles.
