Today we are announcing the extremely tough decision to discontinue certain parts of our business and let go of approximately 3% of staff, mostly from the Nairobi office. We know that this will be a difficult day for everyone at Sama, and we are offering several support programs for those impacted.
Our strategic vision is to be the number one provider of computer vision data annotation. In our quest to realize that vision, we branched out into other adjacent technologies. However, the current economic climate requires more efficient and streamlined business operations. Therefore, we have chosen to refocus our business and concentrate solely on our computer vision annotation technology platform and solutions. This means we will discontinue our work that isn’t closely aligned with that vision, including Natural Language Processing and our Content Moderation business, effective March 2023.
We are encouraging all employees who are eligible to work in Kenya or Uganda to apply for other open positions in the Sama East African offices where they are work-eligible.
All impacted employees will receive severance packages and employees engaged in content moderation will receive well-being support for 12 months after the last day of employment.
As we announced to employees this morning, we are very grateful for our colleagues who leave us in the coming weeks, and proud of the work they have done. While we understand that this is a difficult day, we believe it is the right long-term decision for our business as we continue the important work of providing a platform for AI data annotation through a social impact business model.
