AI job displacement hits Atlassian

Top News

• Atlassian cuts 10% of workforce: SaaSpocalypse now? Australian software giant Atlassian joins the line-up of companies announcing layoffs and shifting at least some of the blame over to advances in AI. The company will drop about 1,600 jobs, and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes explained in a blog post that the intention is to “self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales.” As with Jack Dorsey’s Block layoffs last month, many commentators and social media cynics suspect AI productivity and/or investment is being used as a scapegoat to cover for more fundamental issues facing these organizations.

• Gumloop closes $50M Series B: The company helps startups and enterprises deploy AI agents internally to handle both repetitive and complex, multi-step tasks, largely without keeping humans in the loop. They’re already in use by a range of big names, including Shopify, Ramp, Gusto, and Instacart. This latest $50 million round was led by Benchmark, and includes participation by Shopify, Y Combinator, and others. (TechCrunch reports they weren’t actively seeking fresh capital, but a collaboration with Benchmark was just too good a deal to pass up.)

• Making AI more reliable with math: The New York Times covers a fascinating niche of the AI industry: startups developing advanced mathematical models. These companies, including Axiom Math and Harmonic (co-founded by Robinhood vet Vlad Tenev), are designing models that verify and improve AI-generated computer code and outputs in the same way that mathematicians produce proofs for complex mathematical formulas and equations. Harmonic believes its models can reduce AI hallucinations, while Axiom aims to verify and upgrade the quality of AI-generated code. Both feel like potential additions to the TWiST 500 in the near future.

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For all the talk about OpenClaw and AI agents, the vast majority of AI users — even technical folks and coders — remain wedded to their favorite tools and platforms, rather than designing their own custom apps in Slack or Telegram.

To wit, Cursor. The grandaddy of AI coding assistants remains one of the fastest-growing startups of all time. (ARR was at $2 billion in February.) They’re now reportedly in the midst of a funding round valuing them at a massive $50 billion. (Bloomberg suggests these talks are still in preliminary stages.) Last time on Cursor valuations: In November 2025, they raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation. That’s a pretty strong degree of improvement in less than 6 months.

Still, Cursor’s facing some intense competition, not only from rival vibecoding apps like Replit and Lovable, along with open-source OpenClaw hobbyists, but also from high-profile players like OpenAI and Anthropic. At this point, their own coding assistants — Codex and Claude Code — replicate many of the services and features that Cursor provides, and they seemingly get more powerful each passing month.

Elsewhere in the T500 this week, domestic robot makers Sunday Inc. announced a new $165 million round at a $1.15 billion valuation, led by Coatue. They’re the makers of Memo, the household helper-bot who’s wearing a baseball cap for some reason, and captured attention in a string of viral videos that hit social media late last year, as the company emerged from stealth.

One key advance setting Memo and Sunday’s tech apart from their robot butler rivals: training gloves. While other companies use teleoperation to “teach” their bots new skills, Sunday staffers put on sensor-covered gloves that cost just $400 a pair, then mimic taking care of everyday household tasks. An AI model studies this training data and uses it to teach Memo units how to wash dishes, vacuum, and other basic chore-related movements. – Lon

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