Tech Layoffs: Database Company MariaDB Cuts 28% Of Staff Amid Financial Woes

Database company MariaDB on Thursday announced that it is cutting 28% of its workforce. The move comes as the open-source relational database company recently revealed that four of its board directors resigned amid ongoing concerns regarding MariaDB's financial viability.

"On October 12, 2023, MariaDB plc began implementing its board-approved restructuring plan to better align its workforce with the needs of its business and to reduce the Company's operating costs," MariaDB said in an SEC filing Thursday. Eighty-four people will be affected by the restructuring and the company is expecting to incur approximately $3.1 million in charges related to notice period payments, benefits, severance pay and other related costs.

The Redwood City, California-based company is expecting the majority of the charges to be incurred during the first half of fiscal year 2024.

As part of the restructuring, MariaDB will now "focus its attention on its core MariaDB Enterprise server database product." Furthermore, the company has implemented a plan to help customers migrate off the following products: Xpand and SkySQL.

MariaDB cut several jobs in April and said there was still "concern" over the company's medium-term financial workability, as per The Register. The exact number of affected workers during the April layoffs is unknown.

The April reductions came months after the company warned in a February SEC filing that it has "a history of losses, and as our costs increase, we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to achieve or sustain profitability. It added that it determined "our current cash and cash equivalents would not be sufficient to fund our operations" for at least 12 months from Feb. 13.

News of the Thursday layoffs came just days after the cloud database company announced the resignation of four board directors: Hal Berenson, Christine Russell, Alex Suh and Ted Wang. Yakov "Jack" Zubarev and Michael Fanfant have been appointed into the board.

At the same time, the company also revealed its entry into a $26.5 million senior secured promissory note with RP Ventures which will expire on Jan. 10, 2024.

MariaDB had been seeking financing since earlier this year, but it also said it continued to hire in April even amid the reported job cuts. Chief marketing officer Franz Aman told The Register at the time that job cuts were necessary as the company "had to make sure that we were doing the right things" amid a tech downturn where companies were "concerned about profitability, cash position."

MariaDB joins more than a thousand tech companies that implemented workforce cuts this year – a growing number of them are in the data and cloud segments. More than 240,000 tech employees have lost their jobs since the beginning of the year, as per data from layoffs tracker layoffs.fyi.