On May 27, 2026, Globes and Calcalist reported that BigID, the New York and Tel Aviv-based data privacy and data security unicorn, was cutting roughly 150 employees, about 23% of its 650-person global workforce. Co-founder and CPO Nimrod Vax confirmed the move in a statement framing it as the company "adapting our workforce and accelerating our shift toward an AI-first approach in both software development and operations." Between 20 and 30 of the cuts hit BigID's Tel Aviv development center; the rest are spread across the company's other offices.
BigID is the latest Israeli tech employer this week to consolidate around AI-first operating math, joining Wix's 1,000-person cut on May 25 and AI21 Labs' 110-person reduction earlier in May. The company tied the timing to "the wider adoption of AI-based development tools in enterprises" and a push to improve profitability heading into the second half of 2026.
BigID was founded in 2015 by CEO Dimitri Sirota and CPO Nimrod Vax. The product maps, classifies, and governs sensitive data across enterprise cloud environments. The company is one of the leaders in the data privacy compliance category and has consistently been ranked in the top four by IDC, with roughly 8% share against OneTrust, Securiti, and TrustArc. The customer base is heavy on regulated industries: financial services, healthcare, government, and large enterprises managing GDPR and CCPA obligations.
The funding history is the harder part of the story. BigID raised approximately $320 million across five rounds. The 2020 Series D came at a $1.25 billion valuation against roughly $50 million in ARR. By February 2024, the Series E led by Riverwood Capital with Silver Lake Waterman and Advent International came in at a valuation just over $1 billion against roughly $100 million in ARR. Revenue doubled and the valuation went down. That is the context for the cuts.
Data privacy and data security are categories with high LLM exposure on both sides of the equation. On the product side, the workflows that BigID automates (sensitive data classification, lineage tracking, access governance) are increasingly augmented by foundation-model classifiers and embedding-based search. On the development side, AI coding tools have compressed the engineering headcount required to ship new connectors, classifiers, and policy modules. BigID's framing of the cut as accelerating an AI-first approach is consistent with what Cloudflare, Cisco, and Arctic Wolf said earlier in May when they explained their own AI-tied reductions.
The competitive frame matters. OneTrust raised $920M at a $5.3B valuation. Securiti raised $156M and is reportedly approaching IPO readiness. TrustArc has been refocusing on GRC. BigID's 23% cut is the most aggressive 2026 headcount reduction across the data privacy compliance leaders so far, and it sets the public benchmark for how this category is sizing its operating model around AI tooling.
For investors, the BigID round is the kind of late-stage SaaS data point that does not show up in the AI-driven layoff tracker headlines because the absolute number is small. The 150 cut is roughly one-fifteenth of Wix's same-week reduction. The signal is in the underlying math. A company that doubled ARR from $50M to $100M between Series D and Series E, and saw its valuation come down from $1.25B to "just over $1B," is now also cutting nearly a quarter of its workforce. That trifecta (revenue up, valuation down, headcount down) is the cleanest read so far on how late-stage AI-era SaaS valuations are settling. Expect OneTrust, Securiti, and Collibra to face similar questions on their 2026 operating plans.