It’s been a new year, but the industry’s struggles show no signs of abating. Large companies are also vulnerable – if not more so. This week, Alphabet joined a growing list of tech giants making staff cuts amid ongoing economic struggles. After a wave of layoffs from companies like Amazon, Meta and Salesforce, Alphabet has begun to let people go.
The company’s “Other Bets” division was the first to see the impact. As the name suggests, these divisions operate outside of primary focus areas like search and advertising. With many companies having graduated from Alphabet X’s moonshot factory, the operation has assumed the role of a quasi-internal accelerator.
Earlier this week, life sciences company Verily was slashed by 15%, amounting to about 240 people.
“While these programs are promising and led by talented Veeps, some of their innovations will integrate into our other core solutions,” said CEO Stephen Gillett. , but we couldn’t do everything and had to make some tough choices. a blog post. “Some Veeps will be redeployed to other teams; others will unfortunately leave us. These people have helped make Verily the company it is today, and I know how hard it is to watch precious friends and colleagues go.”
Alphabet’s robotics software company, Intrinsic, was also affected. TechCrunch has confirmed it will lay off 40 employees. It was a huge success for the young division, which makes up about 20% of the staff. Honestly, it’s also a bit of a change for an area that seems to be growing rapidly. In fact, our last two conversations with the company revolved around acquisitions. In less than a year, Passive acquired both do indirectly and open robot – the latter was announced less than a month ago.
“Intrinsic leadership has made the difficult decision to let go of several members of our team,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We communicated the news to them directly. We fully acknowledge how difficult this will be and are providing as much active support as we can. This decision was made based on changes in our priorities and long-term strategic direction. It will ensure Intrinsic can continue to allocate resources to our highest priority initiatives, such as building our software and AI platforms, integrating strategic acquisitions, etc. recent strategy by Vicarious and OSRC (the commercial arm of Open Robotics) and partnerships with key industry partners. While it was extremely difficult to make, we believe this decision is necessary for us to continue our mission.”
At the very least, it’s a huge success for an organization that has just got its footing at sea. There are so many companies competing in the same space as Intrinsic, so it’s hard to say how many steps back such news will ultimately take.
Earlier this week, fellow X robot alum Mineral announced that it had just graduated from the lab.
