Pendo, the Raleigh, North Carolina-based product analytics company and one of the few Triangle tech startups to reach a billion-dollar valuation, cut 90 employees on April 7, 2026, roughly 10 percent of its workforce. Thirty of the ninety cuts hit the Raleigh headquarters on Hillsborough Street downtown. The remaining sixty came out of Pendo's offices in New York, San Francisco, London, and Israel.
CEO Todd Olson framed the reduction as a "refounding" rather than a typical cost-cutting layoff, telling staff in a memo that the company has been "in a process of refounding over the past six months as the technology landscape has changed dramatically." Pendo positions itself as "mission-critical infrastructure" for enterprises building AI agents, and Olson said the workforce reset was necessary to align Pendo's structure with that new product direction. Severance and outplacement support were offered, with terms not publicly disclosed.
Pendo's cuts land in the middle of a broader tech shakeup, with the tech sector accounting for more than 52,000 US job cuts in the first quarter of 2026 alone and AI cited as the leading reason in nearly every major announcement. The "refounding" language is becoming a recurring theme: companies framing AI-driven workforce cuts not as failure but as a reset toward an AI-native operating model. Atlassian, Cognizant, Salesforce, and now Pendo have all used variants of the same vocabulary.
For the Triangle tech ecosystem, Pendo's cuts hit a flagship local employer. The company has raised more than $355 million in venture funding and has been one of the highest-profile homegrown enterprises in the Raleigh-Durham region for over a decade. The 30 Raleigh-area cuts will land in a job market already absorbing reductions at IBM Research Triangle Park, Cisco, and Lenovo through early 2026.