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While layoffs pile up at some of Silicon Valley’s largest employers, Muddu Sudhakar is working his way through a pile of resumes.
“We’re hiring,” says Sudhakar, chief executive of Aisera, whose artificial-intelligence software aims to help companies improve operations while holding down costs. Aisera now has nearly 300 employees after adding 110 jobs in 2022, and the company has plans to add another 40 to 50 new hires in the first quarter of 2023. “I just made an offer today for someone in finance,” Sudhakar told MarketWatch on Dec. 28.
Up the highway in Redwood City, Calif., the nearly 500 employees at C3.ai Inc.
AI,
fill three floors of an office tower. It takes a lap around the expansive parking lot to find a space.
And Abhi Mishra, chief technology officer at the Seattle-based financial startup Human Interest, puts it simply on his LinkedIn profile: “We’re hiring in Engineering, Product, Infosec, and more!”
The company added more than 150 jobs to enlarge its workforce to about 750 and plans to continue apace in 2023.
“We’ve grown quickly but in a controlled and purposeful manner,” Mishra told MarketWatch, citing a tripling of sales year over year and $336.7 million in funding from the likes of U.S. Venture Partners and Softbank Vision Fund 2. (There is more than $2 billion in assets under management on Human Interest’s 401(k) platform.)
“Part of our DNA is to build a business rooted in a firm foundation,” he said. “In this environment, other companies that have pursued fast growth have done so willy-nilly.”
Some startups, especially those in AI, are flush with cash and provide a strong contrast to major employers like Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
Alphabet Inc.’s
GOOGL,
GOOG,
Google, Twitter Inc., Salesforce Inc.
CRM,
Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
Cisco Systems Inc.
CSCO,
Intel Corp.
INTC,
HP Inc.
HPQ,
and others that have been shedding workers by the thousands.
More than 50,000 tech workers lost their jobs in November alone, raising the year’s total to more than 150,000, according to data collected by the website Layoffs.fyi. The San Francisco Bay Area, home of Silicon Valley, was particularly hard hit: Some 47,000 people were let go from 252 tech companies in 2022.
In their pursuit of cost cutting, large tech companies are exploring ways to reduce operations costs and staff, which has led them to AI specialists like Aisera and C3.ai.
Take, for instance, LinearB, a platform designed to help software-engineering teams improve efficiency and track metrics like cycle time. It started 2022 with 40 employees and ended the year with 95. It plans to add 25 more people in 2023.
Dan O’Shaughnessy, chief financial officer at 3-D printing company Formlabs, said the Boston-area company increased its workforce to 850 from 700 last year based on a measured approach to growth and on its appeal to customers seeking to print scarce component parts.
Tech startups adding employees aren’t just defying a tech downturn. They’re gaining traction, much like Amazon
AMZN,
and Google, which also arose from the ashes of economic slumps. The only catch this time, venture capitalists warn, is that they are being more cautious in what they fund.
Total funding plunged 55% to $74.5 billion in the third quarter from the same period a year ago, according to market intelligence provider CB Insights.
Sudhakar, a former executive at ServiceNow Inc.
NOW,
and Splunk Inc.
SPLK,
has parlayed his decades of experience in Silicon Valley into raising $164.5 million from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
GS,
Zoom Video Communications Inc.
ZM,
Menlo Ventures and former eBay Inc.
EBAY,
executive Maynard Webb.
And now he intends to put that money to use to hire more staff.
“My business is doing well, and I want to double down,” Sudhakar told MarketWatch. “There is no reason to slow down. As companies have more budget cuts, they need to improve operations and do more with less people, which is what we specialize in with AI automation.”
