Airtable becomes latest company to announce layoffs, cutting 20% of its workforce

Low-code platform Airtable has announced it would be laying off 254 employees across business development, engineering and other teams, around 20% of its workforce.

In an internal email first seen by the layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi (which is built on Airtable), Airtable founder and CEO Howie Liu said the company will be evolving from a “bottoms-up adopted product” to “bringing connected apps to large enterprises.”

“We’ve rapidly expanded and executed on multiple fronts. At the time, I believed we could successfully pursue all of them in parallel,” Liu wrote in the email to employees. “However, in taking a hard look at our efforts in the current market environment, we’ve identified the teams best positioned to capture the opportunity in enterprise in order to bring complete focus, alignment and accountability in our execution.”

Alongside the cuts to individual teams, Airtable’s chief revenue officer, chief people officer and chief product officer will also be leaving the company. TechCrunch reported that the impacted employees will get at least 16 weeks of severance pay, accelerated equity vesting and support from an immigration counsel, if on a visa.

Airtable, which provides software that allows businesses to put together databases and spreadsheets on the cloud without using code, had a $735 million funding round in December last year at $11-billion valuation, bringing the company’s total investment to $1.4 billion.

The announcement comes at the tail end of a year that has been blighted by job cuts all across the technology sector. Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk laid of around half the social networking platform’s staff after taking ownership in November, while Meta announced it would be cutting 11,000 jobs. Amazon on the other hand plans to quietly layoff 20,000 employees. Since September 2022, HP, Cisco, Stripe, and Microsoft have all announced they would be laying off at least 1,000 employees each.