Tune is going through more changes as the Seattle-based company continues to shift resources.
The mobile marketing startup let go of 11 people last month to streamline its commercial go-to-market strategy, said Tune Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Buma. He said it was not a layoff, but rather a “re-org to optimize our business for moving forward.”
The reduction follows a round of layoffs this past September when Tune cut 30 employees. The company declined to share an updated employee count, but it reported 320 employees in September. It currently has 14 open positions.
Top executives have also recently departed. Ian Sefferman, who joined the company after it acquired his startup MobileDevHQ in 2014, left this month to launch a new startup in Detroit. Patrick Haig, another former MobileDevHQ staffer who was most recently a director of product at Tune, also left this month.
Jonah-kai Hancock, a former senior marketing leader, joined Seattle AI startup Algorithmia last month. Tune’s former vice president of marketing, Jennifer Wong, departed for Seattle trucking startup Convoy in January.
Tune builds technology for mobile marketers, app creators, ad agencies, and many other players in the industry to track and analyze app downloads and usage. It helps customers like Staples, The New York Times, and OpenTable understand what users are doing inside of apps. On Wednesday it announced a partnership with Apple to reveal new data about how users reinstall apps.
Tune, ranked No. 15 on the GeekWire 200, has returned to profitability since the layoffs in September, which were done in part to fix its bottom line.
In regard to potential impact on the company’s business from GDPR, the new European data privacy laws that went into effect last week, Tune sees it as an advantage. It has been working with customers for the past six months to prepare for the changes. The company details its privacy practices here.
“When we’ve done brand research, trust comes out as something that’s synonymous with Tune,” said Buma, who joined Tune one year ago. “For us, GDPR fits in that trust bucket. We’re managing their data correctly; we’re following the right policies and procedures. So for us, GDPR is very important, but it’s kind of not new.”
Asked about impact from Facebook’s recent data privacy scandals, Buma said “there has been no inherent effect on the business,” but he is noticing large multi-national brands rethinking what type of data they should collect and keep.
Tune ran into problems last year after Facebook made a small change in its ad policies related to deep links. Tune relied on deep links to provide data to its customers following a 2014 dustup with Facebook that somewhat limited what it could tell customers about their ads on the social media site. Facebook said in August that it was preventing companies from using deep links for measurement or tracking purposes.
Tune was founded by twin brothers Lucas and Lee Brown in 2009 under the moniker HasOffers; both remain in leadership positions. The company rebranded to Tune in 2014.
Total funding to date is $36.4 million. Tune’s last investment round came in January 2015 when it reeled in a $27 million led by Icon Ventures. It made its fifth acquisition in January, swooping up marketing automation startup Optimob.
