Snyk slashes jobs and races to reinvent itself to keep up with AI

Cybersecurity unicorn Snyk has announced a 4th round of layoffs, shedding 90 employees in Israel and worldwide. The company is reorganizing to “move faster” with AI, at a time when Claude Code might be nibbling at its lunch.

Snyk, a security company focusing on helping software developers find vulnerabilities in their code, is laying off dozens of employees as it is “flattening leadership so decisions move faster.”

The changes will simplify the company's structure and reduce the size of “some teams.”

“A year ago, we made a deliberate decision: not to chase AI Security, but to define and lead it. That decision is paying off,” the company said in a statement.

The company frames the reorganization as a strategic “sharpening” of its focus to serve customers better and take them further into the AI era.

“The way software gets built is changing faster than at any point in our careers, with AI and autonomous agents writing, deploying, and modifying code, and creating more security problems our customers face right now,” Snyk said in a note.

The company also consolidates the research and development (R&D) into 4 key areas, unified under one leader and centered on AI security: AI-written code, autonomous agents in production, vulnerabilities that chain into real attacks, and adversaries “that never sleep.”

“They’re the 4 things that matter most to customers navigating the AI Fog,” Ken MacAskill, CEO of Snyk, said.

“None of this comes at the expense of the security you depend on today.”

This is Snyk’s 4th round of layoffs – previous cuts in 2022–2023 eliminated over 350 employees.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the layoffs affect around 90 employees, and the development center in Israel is hit particularly hard, where the number of remaining employees is small. Snyk, founded by Israeli veterans, gradually shifted its activity abroad. The company has about 1,550 employees, of which only about 90 are in Israel.

A unicorn with decreasing valuation

The hard pivot to AI security comes at a turbulent time for Snyk and the broader cybersecurity industry. Fresh layoffs hit months after the previous CEO, Peter McKay, stepped down in February 2026, and Snyk might be trying to find its footing.

Snyk raised over $1 billion across several funding rounds. After the COVID-19 pandemic, Snyk’s valuation reached an all-time high of 8.5 billion in September 2021, and the company was considered to have one of the hottest cybersecurity IPO prospects.

But the company is still private, and some experts estimate that its IPO prospects are diminishing. The latest round, a $200 million Series G in December 2022, reduced the company’s valuation to $7.4 billion. The Information reported that Snyk considered a buyout last year, but rejected an offer from a private equity firm as it was below $3 billion.

AI is reshaping the entire cybersecurity industry. At the beginning of the year, Anthropic’s new Claude AI security tool, which scans code for vulnerabilities, set cybersecurity stocks on fire, wiping billions from their valuations overnight.

At least 14 cybersecurity companies, including Cloudflare, Arctic Wolf, and Cyberark, have already reduced their headcounts in 2026, according to the Layoffs.fyi tracker.

Weak forecasts previously forced SentinelOne to announce layoffs to improve efficiency by shedding 8% of its workforce, or 230 employees.

Cloudflare cut 1,100 employees to architect the company for the “agentic AI era”.

CyberArk, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks last year for $25 billion, laid off 500 employees, or about 10% of its workforce.

Some cyber pros aren’t convinced that the changes will benefit them.

“As a Snyk user, this is going to be a problem. It's almost expected now that when companies replace their teams with AI, the quality of their product drops. We have already walked away from some tools for this same reason,” one of the Reddit Cybersecurity community members noted.

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