TripleLift laid off one-fifth of its workforce on Thursday, which translates to more than 100 employees, AdExchanger has learned.
The cuts only affect employees in the US and Canada.
TripleLift confirmed the layoffs to AdExchanger.
The company says it’s making this move as a course-correction after lower-than-expected growth. TripleLift invested heavily in company growth last year despite inflation, concerns over an impending recession and a slowdown in ad spend.
“We did not react quickly enough to the changing landscape and build appropriately for this leaner phase,” CEO Dave Clark wrote in a memo announcing the layoffs on Thursday.
TripleLift’s headcount will now be roughly the same as last year following its acquisition of 1plusX, according to the memo.
The cuts at TripleLift are only the latest example in a litany of recent layoffs happening across the ad tech market. There has been bloodletting at the biggies, including Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle Data Cloud, and among programmatic ecosystem players.
Just this week, Yahoo announced that more than 1,000 people will be laid off from its ad tech group as Yahoo shutters its entire SSP business and the Gemini native ad network. EMX (ENGINE Media Exchange) and its parent company, Big Village, filed for bankruptcy and shut down operations on Thursday.
It’s worth calling out that TripleLift, Yahoo and EMX all operate (or, operated, as the case may be) in the SSP and ad exchange category.
But they also have something else in common: Each company is or was backed by private equity.
Lake Capital Partners bought Engine (which later rebranded to Big Village) in the long-ago year 2014, and Yahoo and TripleLift both sold to different PE firms during the 2021 boom phase.
Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in TripleLift at a valuation of $1.4 billion in March 2021, and Apollo Global Management bought Yahoo from Verizon in September for $5 billion.
“But then, starting about a year ago, our whole world shifted,” Clark wrote in his letter to TripleLift employees.
The vibe shifted from feast to famine.
“Building for leaner times means reducing our costs to a manageable level while at the same time being very thoughtful and selective about the areas of the business that we want to invest in to grow,” he wrote. “So, fewer but bolder.”
This is TripleLift’s second round of layoffs in less than three years. The company cut 7% of its global headcount in April 2020 and closed some of its European offices.
