Exclusive: Days After Raising $25 Mn Funding, Tiger Global-Backed SirionLabs Lays Off 130 Employees

Sequoia and Tiger Global-backed SaaS startup SirionLabs laid off around 15% of its total workforce earlier this month, days after announcing a Series D fund raise of $25 Mn, with an eye on turning profitable, sources told Inc42. 

Ajay Agrawal, the founder and CEO of the contract management startup, informed the employees about the decision to cut 15% of workforce across locations in a mail on January 17. Inc42 has seen the mail sent by Agrawal. 

SirionLabs has over 900 employees as per its LinkedIn page, and 15% of it translates to about 130 employees. The startup has offices in the US, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, and Singapore.

In the mail, Agrawal said that the startup has to shift its business strategy towards profitability due to the current macroeconomic environment, and this will result in downsizing.  

SirionLabs offered a salary of two months as severance package to the impacted employees. Devops, analysts, and support teams, among others, were impacted by the layoffs, the sources said.

In a written statement sent to Inc42, Hiro Notaney, CMO of SirionLabs, confirmed the job cuts. “We are positioning the company for long-term profitable growth based on a sustainable cost structure. We are realigning our resources to achieve that goal,” he said.

The layoffs came as a shock to the employees, the sources said, as unlike startups which have laid off employees due to a cash crunch, SirionLabs raised a funding earlier this month. 

On January 4, the SaaS startup announced raising $25 Mn as part of its extended Series D funding round from Brookfield Growth. This tranche helped the startup close its $110 Mn Series D round. 

Earlier, the Washington-headquartered startup had raised $85 Mn in the round from Partners Group, Avatar Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Tiger Global, among others. 

SirionLabs has raised around $170 Mn across multiple rounds till date. Late last year, the startup also acquired Seattle-based contract automation firm Zendoc for an undisclosed amount. 

SirionLabs, founded in 2012 by Agrawal, Kanti Prabha, Aditya Gupta, and Claude Marais, offers a smart contract management service for authoring, extraction, obligation management and collaboration. Its AI-powered offerings enable legal and contract management teams to exercise control over the lifecycle of a contract from authoring to active in-life management and from renewals to termination of contracts. 

It claims to have more than 250 clients across 70 countries and manages 5 Mn contracts worth $450 Bn. 

With the layoffs, SirionLabs has joined the growing list of tech companies to have laid off employees since last year. As per Inc42’s layoff tracker, Indian startups have laid off over 20,000 employees since 2022. More than 15 Indian startups, including Ola, ShareChat, Innovaccer, and Bounce, have laid off around 2,000 employees in 2023 so far.