Olive AI Inc. cut 450 jobs on Tuesday and pared its product lines to core billing automation software that represents 80% of its revenue, announcing the move in an all-staff email that the company also shared with Columbus Business First.
About 850 employees remain nationwide, the company confirmed. Olive had grown to 1,300 employees after hiring 250 since the start of the year, but instituted a freeze in early June.
Olive still plans to renovate the former Anthem campus in Worthington as a new headquarters, but will spend less than planned at first, it said in written responses to questions.
Just over one year ago, Olive raised $400 million at a $4 billion unicorn valuation, the largest VC round at the highest valuation in Ohio history. In 2020 it had raised $384 million. Over its lifetime the total is $848 million.
Founder and CEO Sean Lane told staff the company’s own “missteps” were compounded by the downturn in the economy this year.
“Olive’s values of ‘choose vision over status quo’ and ‘act with urgency’ drove us to make significant investments across the most pressing parts of healthcare, scale our teams and move quickly to bring solutions to the market,” Lane said.
“Our fast-paced growth and lack of focus strained our product and engineering resources and prevented us from executing quickly on key initiatives. I take responsibility for this.”
Without giving specifics, the company said in its written response to Business First that the new strategy will result in “some changes to the roles and responsibilities of our executive team.”
Sean Lane, founder and CEO of Olive AI Inc., said in an all-staff message: “Our fast-paced growth and lack of focus strained our product and engineering resources and prevented us from executing quickly on key initiatives. I take responsibility for this.”
Dan Trittschuh | For CBF
Instead of pouring resources into growing market share and tackling clinical decision-making and other challenges through artificial intelligence, Olive will focus on core products: automation for determining insurance coverage and billing for some 950 hospital clients, and utilization management for health insurers (the series of decisions leading to whether a procedure should be covered because it’s backed by medical evidence).
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