Self-driving technology company Cruise is laying off 67 employees at its Bellevue, Wash., engineering center, part of widespread cuts at the GM-backed firm.
Cruise on Monday submitted a WARN notification to Washington’s Employment Security Department (ESD), stating that 67 people were laid off at the Bellevue office, which opened in 2019. The company has around 300 employees in the Seattle area, according to LinkedIn.
Cruise is laying off 24% of its workforce, or about 900 employees, across the company, as it deals with the fallout of an incident in October in which a pedestrian was run over by one of its self-driving cars. The California DMV suspended the company’s self-driving permits after the incident.
Since then, the company’s CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt resigned, and other executives were dismissed by the board following a safety review.
The company was already dealing with safety issues before the Oct. 2 incident, including two collisions with other vehicles in San Francisco, where it had permission to operate cars without human drivers.
Cruise began testing its cars in Seattle — with human drivers — in August, joining other self-driving vehicle companies currently testing in Seattle, including Zoox and NVIDIA, both of which received permits from the Seattle Department of Transportation under its Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permit program. SDOT’s permit requires a human driver in the vehicle who is monitoring and ready to take control if the need arises.
Cruise was founded in 2013 and has raised a total of $10 billion. Microsoft was part of a $2 billion investment in Cruise in 2019, joining GM and Honda and other key investors, including Walmart, and T. Rowe Price.
Update: Cruise plans to shut down the Bellevue office, at 3180 139th Ave SE, on Dec. 22. The closure was a previously planned decision independent from the broader layoffs announced last week, and was made due to low office usage, the company confirmed to GeekWire.
