Eight months after bringing in a $40 million Series D, Moogsofts co-founder and chief executive officer Phil Tee confirmed to TechCrunch that the IT incident management startup had shed 18 percent of its workforce, or just over 30 employees.The layoffs took place at the end of October; shortly after, Moogsoft announced two executive hires.
Among the additions was Amer Deeba, who recently resigned from Qualys after the United States Securities and Exchange Commission chargedhim with insider trading.Founded in 2012, San Francisco-based Moogsoft provides artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) to help teams work more efficiently and avoid outages.
The startup has raised $90 million in equity funding to date, garnering a $220 million valuation with its latest round, according to PitchBook.
Its backed by Goldman Sachs, Wing Venture Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Dells corporate venture capital arm, Singtel Innov8, Northgate Capital and others.
Wing VC founder and long-time Accel managing partner Peter Wagner and Redpoint partner John Walecka are among the investors currently sitting on Moogsofts board of directors.Tee, the founder of two public companies (Micromuse and Riversoft) admitted the layoffs affected several teams across the company.
The cuts, however, arenota sign of a struggling business, he said, but rather a right of passage for a startup seeking venture scale.We are a classic VC-backed startup that has sort of grown up, Tee told TechCrunch earlier today.
In pretty much every successful company, there is a point in time where theres an adjustment in strategy Unfortunately, when you do that, it becomes a question of do we have the right peopleMoogsoft doubled revenue last year and added 50 Fortune 200 companies as customers, according to a statement announcing its latest capital infusion.
Tee said hes extremely chipper about the road ahead and the companys recent C-suite hires.Moogsofts newest hires, CFO Raman Kapur (left) andCOO Amer Deeba (right).Moogsoft announced its latest executive hires on November 2, only one week after completing the round of layoffs, a common strategy for companies looking to cast a shadow on less-than-stellar news, like major staff cuts.
Those hires include former Splunk vice president of finance Raman Kapur as Moogsofts first-ever chief financial officer and Amer Deeba, a long-time Qualys executive, as its chief operating officer.Deeba spent the last 17 years at Qualys, a publicly traded provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions.
In August, he resigned amid allegations of insider trading.
The SECannounced its charges against Deeba on August 30, claiming he had notified his two brothers of Qualys missed revenue targets before thecompany publicly announced its financial results in the spring of 2015.Deeba informed his two brothers about the miss and contacted his brothers brokerage firm to coordinate the sale of all of his brothers Qualys stock, the SEC wrote in a statement.
When Qualys publicly announced its financial results, it reported that it had missed its previously-announced first-quarter revenue guidance and that it was revising its full-year 2015 revenue guidance downward.
On the same day, Deeba sent a message to one of his brothers saying, We announced the bad news today.
The next day, Qualyss stock price dropped 25%.
Although Deeba made no profits from his conduct, Deebas brothers collectively avoided losses of $581,170 by selling their Qualys stock.Under the terms of Deebas settlement, he is ineligibleto serve as an officer or director of any SEC-reporting company for two years and has been ordered to pay a $581,170 penalty.Tee, for his part, said there was never any admission of guilt from Deeba and that hes already had a positive impact on Moogsoft.[Deeba] is a tremendously impressive individual and he has the full confidence of myself and the board, Tee said.