$967 million startup DataStax laid off 15+ employees last week — its third round of job cuts since its new CEO joined in October

apigee ceo chet kapoor

The $967 million data management startup DataStax laid off about 15 employees last week, two sources told Business Insider.
This is DataStax's fourth round of layoffs in the past year and third since Chet Kapoor replaced Bill Bosworth as CEO in October 2010.
DataStax was reportedly heading towards an IPO in spring 2019, but the year since has been marked by management shake-ups and job cuts.
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DataStax, an enterprise software startup valued at an estimated $967 million, laid off about 15 employees last week – its third round of layoffs in less than six months.

DataStax builds data management software using Apache Cassandra, a popular open source database originally started at Facebook. In spring 2019, DataStax was reportedly heading towards a IPO, but the company has since faced a management shake-up and multiple cuts: This was the third round of layoffs since the arrival of new CEO Chet Kapoor in October 2019.

The most recent layoffs took place the second week of April and affected between 15 and 20 people, primarily in sales and solutions engineering, including several high-ranking employees, two sources with knowledge of the cuts told Business Insider.

A DataStax spokesperson declined comment.

Because there had already been two rounds of layoffs recently, the most recent job cuts caught employees by surprise, one source said.

That same source said that Kapoor told employees that the company wasn't growing quickly enough to justify its headcount. The layoffs come less than a month after DataStax acquired the consulting and services firm The Last Pickle in early March.

A long year of layoffs for DataStax

The latest layoffs follow a spate of leadership departures and structural changes at DataStax in the past year.

In July 2019, former CEO Billy Bosworth laid off a little less than 10% of the company's staff and restructured the company moving some employees into new teams.

Kapoor, known for taking Apigee public and then selling it to Google in 2016, replaced Bosworth in October 2019. Soon after, Kapoor brought several former Apigee employees onto the leadership team and started to steer the company towards building its appeal for developers, former employees say. Less than a quarter into his tenure, DataStax laid off between 60 and 100 people in December.

Then, a few months later in February, DataStax had another round of layoffs, four former employees told Business Insider. That round affected about 20 to 30 employees, across sales, marketing, and business development, those sources said.

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