The Volatile Market that Forced Anjuna's Layoffs

In 2021, Anjuna Security was growing fast, hiring aggressively, and chasing a market that seemed limitless. By the end of that year, the venture-backed cybersecurity company had scaled to around 75 employees, building out sales, customer success, and support teams in anticipation of continued hypergrowth.

The Difficult Decision to Lay Off

As the market turned, enterprise clients became harder to land. Like many startups building at that time, Anjuna was overextended and underfunded. So the company was forced to make a difficult decision and laid off a portion of its staff, then conducted another round of layoffs months later.

"We have only one word when it comes to culture, and that’s care," said Ayal Yogev, the CEO and co-founder of Anjuna. "We care about our employees. We care about our customers."

A Culture Built on Care

One of the reasons Anjuna was able to endure two rounds of layoffs was that the company had already put in the time to build a strong internal culture, anchored in a simple idea. Internally, that meant transparency and communicating clearly about what was happening and why. Externally, it meant supporting departing employees beyond severance, from sharing job opportunities through investor networks to ensuring continued access to benefits like healthcare.

• Crucially, the company avoided common pitfalls that erode trust during layoffs like prolonged uncertainty, impersonal processes, or silence from leadership.
• Decisions were made quickly, and conversations were handled directly.
• Even so, the impact was real, and a second round of layoffs made rebuilding trust more difficult.

Rebuilding with a New Approach

Today, Anjuna is rebuilding with a different approach. Hiring is more deliberate. Sales growth is tied closely to actual demand. And new tools, including AI, are helping the team operate more efficiently without overexpanding.

• "There's kind of two things people do, like the kind of worst companies are looking for somebody to blame and that always ends up creating a culture of people are just trying to not make mistakes,"

said Yogev. "Just creates a culture of blaming, which is just completely counterproductive, right?\