Utah-borne online education company Pluralsight on Thursday announced it is laying off 17% of its global workforce and moving its corporate headquarters from Utah to Westlake, Texas.
“Over the past year, we have been transforming our business to position the company for sustained growth and to enhance the value we provide for our customers,” Pluralsight CEO Erin Gajdalo said in a statement. “As we focus on the growth and sustainability of our business, we determined that a new and rightsized headquarters is in the best interest of Pluralsight.”
The new headquarters in Texas will add another location to the company’s lineup that already includes Dublin, India, Austin, Texas and, of course, Draper.
Despite moving headquarters, Gajdalo said the company won’t soon forget its Utah roots.
“To our team members, partners, and customers in the Salt Lake area and Utah more broadly, we remain fully committed to serving you with excellence, and we expect our total employee population in the state to remain consistent,” Gajdalo said. “Utah is where Pluralsight was founded more than 20 years ago and we are grateful to the state for the important role it has played in Pluralsight’s history.”
The latest move comes four months after Pluralsight reached a settlement agreement in a class action lawsuit, agreeing to split $20 million among tens of thousands of investors who purchased stock in 2018 and 2019.
The suit was originally filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in August 2019 and transferred to the District of Utah two months later.
A handful of public employee retirement funds alleged that the company and some executives misled investors about the “size and productivity of Pluralsight’s sales force,” artificially inflating the stock price before and during a secondary public offering, before “disappoint(ing) financial results” and the resignation of an executive caused shares to plummet in value by almost 40%, court documents say.
