RapidAPI, valued at $1 billion last year, cuts staff by 50%

Rapid (previously known as RapidAPI), a startup that built out an API marketplace valued at $1 billion last year, is cutting 50% of its staff TechCrunch has learned.

According to an email to employees from CEO Marc Friend viewed by TechCrunch, the move is part of “a significant restructuring” in an effort to “right-size the company.”

In the email, Friend said that Rapid tried “to compete on too many fronts” as a product company.

He added: “We have grown large as an organization and often sacrificed agility. Moving forward, we will be disciplined on our product focus and ruthless about customer success.” Friend only last week took over the role of chief executive of the company. CEO and founder Iddo Gino is now a technical advisor, per a company announcement.

The layoffs are believed to have impacted 115 people and are hitting workers across Europe, Tel Aviv and San Francisco, according to a source familiar with internal happenings at the company. The email — which went out on Monday — said only that “a large number” of employees would be let go “in the next few days.” Workers across several departments — including sales, talent acquisition, engineering, product and marketing — are said to have been affected.

The company has confirmed to TechCrunch that it expects to reduce its team size “by around 50% and close all open roles,” but it declined to confirm the specific number of individuals affected.

In a statement via email, a spokesperson said: “Following the path of many technology companies recently, our new incoming CEO and the Board have made the difficult decision to implement a restructuring and will be saying goodbye to many of our friends and colleagues. The decision to reduce the number of employees and rebalance investments is one we don’t take lightly.”

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RapidAPI built a platform that helps businesses find and integrate third-party APIs, as well as manage their own usage of their own internal APIs. It raised $150 million in March of 2022 in a Series D round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. Other backers include Qumra, Andreessen Horowitz, M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Viola Growth, Green Bay and Grove Ventures. 

Last November, RapidAPI announced it had rebranded to Rapid and that more than 4 million developers used its public API hub. That hub, it claimed, had grown to among the world’s largest — giving developers the ability to integrate more than 40,000 APIs from companies such as Twilio, Microsoft and Google. At the time, it touted new enterprise customers such as ATA, Poly, Formula 1’s Scuderia AlphaTauri and Sun Life Financial. It also boasted that it had doubled its company employees in the past year — to 200.

RapidAPI also opened a new European headquarters in Berlin last July.

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