Scale-out file system provider WEKA is laying off 50 employees roles, according to sources, as it restructures go-to-market functions in the era of generative AI.
CEO Liran Zvibel blogged about the shake-up, saying privatley-owned WEKA enjoyed a “milestone” 2024 in which it raised $140 million in E-round funding, giving it a valuation of $1.6 billion, and surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
However WEKA’s market is changing from traditional HPC and enterprise analytics due to generative AI. Zvibel says: “The generative AI and enterprise AI markets have continued to explode. The rate of innovation by AI industry titans – many of whom are WEKA’s partners and customers – has been astonishing, creating a once-in-a-generation opportunity for commercial enterprises, governments, and research organizations alike.”
He thinks WEKA has to reflect this so it can exploit the opportunity, saying “the token economy is here”. A digital token is a piece of data used by AI models, typically being vectorized first.
The competition to supply data and provide data pipelines for GenAI model training and inference is intense. Examples include DDN’s March 17 AI Data Summit announcement, VAST Data with its data infrastructure engineered for AI, all the mainstream storage suppliers piling in to the market along with the rush of fast object storage suppliers, such as Cloudian, MinIO and Scality. And then there are the data managers and orchestrators – Arcitecta, Hammerspace, Komprise, and others – building AI-focused data pipelines. Across the storage industry, generative AI has driven AI-focused developments.
Zvibel says: “To accelerate innovation with our customers and partners, we have initiated a strategic restructuring of our go-to-market functions. While change is difficult, we are confident that this will position WEKA and our customers for long-term success as we navigate the dynamic and rapidly evolving AI market.”
Go-to-market (GTM) functions can include marketing, product management, sales, channel strategy and management, customer success, partnerships and alliances, and other aspects such as revenue operations.
B&F understands roughly 50 employees are affected and WEKA expects to grow headcount by approximately 120 in the coming year. Specifically, the company told B&F: “This is not a retraction in headcount; this is a strategic realignment of our people and investments to focus our resources on pursuing large-scale enterprise AI and GPU acceleration deployments worldwide. We are continuing to hire across the business – including our GTM functions.”
WEKA currently has some 75 open slots globally in Customer Success, Sales, R&D, G&A, Product Management, and Marketing. Zvibel says: “In the coming year, we will deliver bold innovation to our customers, scale our investments in R&D, product innovation, and customer success, and expand our team across all business functions to accelerate our growth trajectory.”
