CloudMine lays off one-third of its workforce

Center City digital health firm CloudMine held two all-team meetings Monday: one before and one after the round of layoffs that shrunk its headcount by 35 percent.

CEO Steve Wray, a life sciences and healthcare exec who joined the company last summer, told Technical.ly that 11 people across departments in all levels of the organization were let go amid a shift in the organization’s model. Wray said the “difficult task” took the staff’s size from 28 to 16, including one resignation.

“The key thing here was to respect the quality of people that we had,” a hoarse Wray said. “The quality of the people made this decision doubly hard.”

According to CEO, who took over the position from founder Brendan McCorkle, the staff changes were necessary to adapt to “a market that’s evolving before our eyes” and is demanding more nimbleness from the company in the current healthcare ecosystem.

“It’s becoming clear in our experience that trying to apply a legacy model to an evolving company was simply not going to be supportable going forward,” the exec said. “We’re now focused on supporting our customers, we’re confident in the structure.”

Support was offered to those laid off by way of severance packages and assistance in career guidance and networking.

In 2015, CloudMine raised its first institutional round by way of a $5 million Series A from local investors, with now embattled venture firm Safeguard Scientifics. The Radnor, Pa.-based firm also joined a $7.3 million Series A1 round of funding announced in April of last year. Wray ceded that the recent developments at Safeguard were “certainly a consideration among many factors” when deciding on the layoff round. Now a leaner team, the company will be seeking more funding this year.

Despite the shakeup in structure, there’s no change in the works to the company’s main offering, a healthcare-focused, cloud-based platform that helps orgs build connected health applications. The lesson stemming from the layoffs, Wray said, has to do with clarity of mission.

“You want to make sure you’ve identified and articulated a sustainable mission,” Wray said. “Despite the difficulty of today’s decision in terms of implementing the layoffs, our mission is rock solid. We believe healthcare is dysfunctional and disconnected. We’re committed to a future state where healthcare is digitally driven, functionally connected and inherently secure.”