Qualtrics is cutting about 14% of its workforce to reduce costs and restructure its organization, citing a need to address the internal complexity created by its past hiring and growth.
The privately held experience-management software company, co-headquartered in Provo, Utah, and Seattle, will lay off 780 employees, according to an internal memo to employees Wednesday morning from Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin. Its headcount was 5,500 before the cuts.
Qualtrics employs about 900 people in Seattle. Its office in downtown Seattle will remain in operation after the layoffs, according to the company.
“Rapid hiring was essential to enable our growth up to this point, but it also created complexity that does not support continued growth at our scale,” Serafin wrote in the memo. “Simply put, the organizational structures, work processes and the way we made decisions previously don’t work for the company we’ve become, or the company we aspire to be.”
In addition to the layoffs, “several hundred roles are changing or moving locations over the next year,” he wrote in the memo provided by the company to GeekWire and later made public on its site.
Serafin explained that the changes will “touch every team at the company,” adding that they follow “a deep review of every function in the company.” The changes are meant to improve collaboration, time to market, and the ease of doing business with customers and partners, he wrote.
He thanked and apologized to departing employees, outlining plans for a minimum of 10 weeks of severance pay for U.S. employees, depending on tenure and level, in addition to other benefits and career services.
Qualtrics laid off about 270 employees in January.
Hundreds of tech companies have laid off staff over the past few years amid a broader industry downturn, which came after a pandemic-driven software boom.
Founded in 2002, Qualtrics bills itself as the leader and creator of the “experience management” category. Its products help companies collect and analyze data, through surveys and other technologies, to make customer and employee decisions. More than 90% of the Fortune 100 are Qualtrics customers.
SAP acquired Qualtrics for $8 billion in 2019. The company spun out of SAP two years later and raised $1.55 billion in an initial public offering.
Earlier this year Qualtrics went private again, with Silver Lake buying the company in a $12.5 billion deal. In the first quarter — the last time Qualtrics publicly reported financials — Qualtrics reported $409.8 million in revenue, up 22% year-over-year.
The company has 28 offices globally. Qualtrics’ downtown Seattle tower was renamed Qualtrics Tower in 2019 when the company leased 275,000 square feet across 13 stories in the building, then under development. Qualtrics is now using eight of those floors.
