TripleLift laid off a double-digit percentage of employees on Friday, AdExchanger has learned.
A spokesperson for the company could neither confirm nor deny the exact number of people who were let go nor the roles that were affected, but AdExchanger was able to ascertain that the total is less than 20%.
The company had more than 450 employees across six offices as of April.
The layoffs come roughly four months after TripleLift hired Dave Helmreich as its new CEO. Helmreich took the reins in February, succeeding Dave Clark, who left the company last July.
Considering when Helmreich joined, the timing of this restructuring appears logical.
It takes a few months for a new CEO get settled. And no one wants to rock the boat in the lead-up to or during Cannes Lions, which is a crucial time for business development, sales meetings and closing deals.
It’s possible that the layoffs are due to TripleLift feeling pressure from its majority shareholder, Vista Equity Partners, which acquired a controlling stake in the company in 2021 in a deal reportedly valued at $1.4 billion. Private equity firms are notorious for aggressive cost cutting to boost profitability, often through recurring layoffs.
This is the third round of layoffs at TripleLift in the past five years.
Turning back the clock, in early 2023 TripleLift laid off more than 100 employees in the US and Canada, which translated to roughly one-fifth of its workforce. This came about four months after Clark, the previous CEO, took the helm – eerily similar timing to this latest round of cuts under Helmreich.
In a memo explaining the 2023 layoffs, Clark characterized those cuts as a course correction following lower-than-expected growth due to market changes and a slowdown in ad spending the previous year.
TripleLift also completed another round of layoffs in April 2020, right after the pandemic first started, although a lot of companies cut their workforces during that same period.
The 2020 layoffs saw a 7% global reduction in TripleLift’s workforce. The SSP also trimmed salaries and furloughed an unspecified number of employees. However, everyone who was furloughed in that round was eventually brought back to the company.
