Two paragraphs into the official statement, BigID gets to the part the press release was built around: “We are choosing to fully embrace the change. The employees leaving the company have made major contributions to our business, growth and culture over the years, and we are committed to supporting them during this transition.”
The change in question is 150 jobs out of 650. On May 26, 2026, the Israeli data-security unicorn confirmed to Globes that it was cutting more than 20% of its workforce — roughly 23%, with an estimated 20–30 of the cuts at its Tel Aviv development center. The company’s framing: it is “accelerating an AI-first approach in both software development and operations.” The calendar’s framing: this is the second four-figure Israeli tech announcement in two days, after Wix cut 1,000 on May 25, and the third in a week if Meta’s Tel Aviv share of its 8,000-person global cut is counted.
The number
BigID was last valued at roughly $1 billion in a 2023 round and has raised about $260 million in total from Redwood, Advent, Bessemer, and Cisco. It was founded in 2015 by CEO Dmitri Sirota and CPO Nimrod Vax and sells an enterprise platform for mapping, classifying, and securing sensitive data — the kind of compliance-adjacent tool that should, by every consultant’s slide, be benefiting from AI-driven enterprise data growth rather than shrinking around it. The company’s own statement reads “the data and AI market is stronger than ever and we have a category-leading product” in the same paragraph in which it explains the cut. Both can be true. Only one of them is the reason 150 people lost their jobs.
The other reason is the Calcalist version of the story, which the Israeli tech press wrote out plainly: the timing of the wave of Israeli layoffs in late May 2026 is connected to enterprises adopting AI-based development tools, and to companies wanting to start the second half of the year on a more profitable footing. BigID’s H1 2026 ended five weeks ago. The runway pressure is real for late-stage unicorns at a $1B-ish valuation who have not yet found their next markup.
The pattern
Inside Israel, this is the fourth notable AI-attributed cut in two weeks. Wix cut 1,000 (20%) on May 25. Meta started executing its 8,000-person global cut on May 26, including in Tel Aviv. Intuit cut 3,000 globally on May 20, including Hod Hasharon. The Israeli tech press is treating it as a sequence, not a coincidence. The English-language wires are still reporting these as individual press releases.
Outside Israel, the year-to-date arithmetic is consistent with what BigID just did. Challenger, Gray & Christmas’s tally puts AI-attributed layoffs at roughly 50,000 of the ~300,000 total tech cuts in 2026 — about 17%. That is the floor, not the ceiling, because the share of “we restructured around AI” stories that simply do not name AI in the press release is high. BigID names it explicitly. Wix names “AI-native infrastructure” explicitly. Meta named its AAI consolidation explicitly. Coinbase named “AI-native pods” explicitly. The companies that name it are the ones whose CEOs have already decided the narrative is more useful than the alternative — “macro” or “crypto winter” or “post-pandemic over-hiring.”
What the “AI-first” reframe actually means at a 650-person company
There is a specific shape to a 23% cut at a series-late B2B SaaS company at a unicorn valuation. It is not the Meta-style reorganization where one Vice President’s headcount line is consolidated under another Vice President. It is closer to a Wix-style “we made the same product with fewer humans because the AI tools meant we could.” For BigID, the explicit citation is software development and operations — which means engineering and customer-facing functions together. That is GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Devin, and the like on the dev side, and AI-driven tier-1 support and CSM automation on the ops side. Neither is hypothetical. Both have been in production at companies BigID’s size since at least 2024.
The honest version of this announcement is that AI-assisted engineering is good enough now that a 650-person company can do its 2026 roadmap with 500 people, and that capital markets are tight enough that the board would rather take the severance hit in Q2 than carry the burn into Q3. That is a defensible business decision. It is also a worker-displacement event that the company is, in its own words, choosing to fully embrace.
What to watch
- The H2 2026 funding/Series F news. A 23% cut framed as an “AI-first” pivot at a unicorn valuation is, in the current market, a pre-conditioning move for the next round. If BigID announces a Series F or a strategic at a flat-to-down valuation in Q3, the May 26 cut was the run-rate adjustment that made the round possible. If it announces an acquisition discussion instead, the cut was the EBITDA polish that made the multiple work.
- The Tel Aviv share. 20–30 of the 150 are in Tel Aviv per Globes. If a follow-on round of cuts lands disproportionately on the Tel Aviv R&D center — versus US sales/CSM — the “AI-first development” framing is doing real work. If the next wave is US-side, the framing is closer to operating-leverage rebalancing.
- The other late-stage Israeli unicorns. Globes is implicitly listing BigID alongside Wix, Meta TA, and Intuit Hod Hasharon. The pattern would extend cleanly to the cohort of late-stage Series D/E Israeli SaaS that hasn’t IPO’d — companies in identity, observability, and DevSec where AI-native incumbents are now real competition. The next four-figure announcement in Israeli tech is the one to read against this template.
- The Challenger July print. The next monthly tally is the one that will either confirm AI-attributed cuts as a rising share of US tech layoffs, or show the trend topping out. The May numbers, when published, will already include BigID, Wix, Meta’s May 20 wave, and Cisco’s 4,000 fiscal-Q3 cut.