Cybersecurity company Snyk has carried out a new, fourth round of layoffs in Israel. An email sent Wednesday morning to about 90 employees in Israel and to staff elsewhere in the world said the company needed to reduce headcount, and several dozen workers were then summoned to hearings. The layoffs are part of a broader cutback across Snyk’s U.S. hubs, but in Israel, where the company already has a relatively small workforce, they are a significant blow to the research and development center.
Snyk was founded by Israeli founders in Britain and the United States. At the start of the decade, it operated a development center in Israel with several hundred employees, but over time it expanded abroad and replaced its Israeli founders, including former CEO Guy Podjarny, with American management. Today, the company employs about 1,550 people, of whom only about 90 are in Israel, according to LinkedIn.
Despite its size, the Israeli operation is considered a high-quality center that employs senior cybersecurity and software engineers. Peter McKay, who has led the company since 2019, said earlier this year he would step down, adding that the next stage requires leadership “with deep roots in product innovation and artificial intelligence.”
Snyk, like Checkmarx and GitHub, has been affected by the February launch of Claude Code, a software update focused on scanning code for cybersecurity vulnerabilities. As AI agents increasingly write code and find bugs themselves, Snyk and Checkmarx have launched competing tools, Evo and Developer Assist, respectively. The company’s major investors include Qatar Investment Authority, which was involved in a valuation drop from $8.6 billion to $7.4 billion in the years after the pandemic-era tech bubble. Snyk had not responded as of publication.
