Visa Cuts 2,600 Jobs, 7% of Staff, on Tech and Product Teams

Visa will cut about 2,600 jobs, or 7% of its workforce, on its technology and product teams, Bloomberg reported the same day the payments giant reports quarterly earnings, as it spends heavily on AI and agentic commerce after a quarter in which costs grew as fast as revenue; Bhavish Aggarwal's Krutrim halved the roughly 50 people left in his AI startup; Uphold cut 85 in a crypto-winter pivot to enterprise; and BuzzFeed is shedding 35% of staff under new owner Byron Allen.

July 2026 so far (through July 28): roughly 16,705 precisely counted layoffs across 30 companies, up from about 14,020 across 28 through Monday, as Visa's 2,600 and Uphold's 85 enter the count. BuzzFeed's roughly 180 (digital media, flagged like Disney and WPP, not pure tech) and Krutrim's 20 to 25 (range) sit outside the confirmed count, alongside the standing range-reported cuts: several hundred at Disney/Pixar, about 100 at Native Instruments, and more than 100 at Nothing.

Visa cuts 2,600, 7% of staff, on tech and product teams

Visa (NYSE: V), which employs roughly 34,000 people, plans to cut about 2,600 jobs, or about 7% of its workforce, Bloomberg reported Tuesday citing a staff memo, with Reuters adding that the cuts will "primarily affect the technology and product teams." The memo frames the move as making the payments processor "more efficient in a tough payments industry." Visa did not immediately comment, and severance terms were not disclosed in the reporting.

The timing is the first tell. The news broke the same day Visa reports its fiscal third-quarter 2026 results, after the close, with a 5 p.m. ET call. Analysts expect earnings of about $3.23 a share on roughly $11.4 billion in revenue. Putting the layoff out before the print lets management field the cost question on the call rather than in a leaked headline afterward.

The real mechanism is cost discipline under AI-investment pressure, not AI replacing the people let go. Visa's fiscal second-quarter results in April showed net revenue up 17% to $11.2 billion, the fastest growth since 2022, but non-GAAP operating expenses also rose 17%, driven by "personnel and marketing." That broke Visa's long run of expenses growing slower than revenue, meaning the quarter produced no operating leverage even as the top line surged. CFO Chris Suh told analysts the agentic-commerce and stablecoin bets are long-horizon investments rather than near-term payoffs, part of a push the company has said will take years to mature.

And Visa is pouring money into exactly those bets. At its Payments Forum in June, Visa announced an OpenAI partnership, a "Large Transaction Model" trained on billions of its own transactions for fraud detection, and a Visa Intelligent Commerce platform for agentic commerce, with stablecoin settlement running at about a $7 billion annualized rate. CEO Ryan McInerney has repeatedly pitched Visa as the "leading hyperscaler of payments globally." Cutting the technology and product teams while building agentic-commerce infrastructure is the same cut-to-invest shape as GitLab, monday.com, and PayPal this year: the builders go so the platform bet can be fed.

The competitive pressure is real and separate from AI. Fintechs, regulation (the Justice Department's monopoly suit), and stablecoins are all pressing on the card-fee economics that still fund Visa, which is why "efficiency in a tough payments industry" lands as more than spin even though no one was replaced by an agent. Visa's last big round was about 1,400 jobs in late 2024, roughly 1,000 of them in technology, to streamline its international business. This round is nearly twice that, and it lands on the same tech and product benches.

The counter-signal is internal, not external: Visa is simultaneously signing AI partners (Alchemy, Nuvion) and adding agentic-token capabilities, so the cut is a reallocation toward the AI build, not a retreat from it. The classic "cut here, hire there" shape, just inside one company.

Krutrim halves what's left of Bhavish Aggarwal's AI startup

Krutrim, the "AI for India" startup founded by Ola chief Bhavish Aggarwal, cut another 20 to 25 employees, India Today and Inc42 reported Tuesday, citing the Economic Times. That is nearly half of the estimated 40 to 50 people who remained before this round, the second restructuring of 2026.

This round hit core product and engineering teams, after earlier rounds had already gutted sales, go-to-market, and business operations. Several teams are now down to a single employee, per the reports. The stated reason is an "organisational restructuring" and a pivot to AI cloud infrastructure and enterprise services, centered on Krutrim Cloud and Krutrim Maps. The consumer-facing AI assistant, Kruti, has been discontinued, and the original ambition of building indigenous foundation models and even semiconductor chips has been shelved.

The real story is the arc, not this round's number. Krutrim's workforce has fallen from more than 550 in August 2025 to roughly 150 to 160 by March, and now to about 40 to 50, a contraction of more than 90% in a year. Most of its revenue reportedly still comes from the Ola Group rather than independent customers. Current and former employees told ET that reimbursements for travel, food, and accommodation have gone unpaid for over five months, and that salary, leave-encashment, and exit settlements are being cleared in installments. Aggarwal separately faces a bailable warrant, per a separate Latestly report.

This is not AI substitution. Nobody was replaced by a model. It is the collapse of an over-ambitious AI startup retreating to a small cloud shop, with the founder's broader legal and financial troubles as backdrop. The irony is the flavor the reader keeps rewarding: a company that pitched itself as building "AI for India" is now trimming engineering down to solo seats. It belongs in the same bucket as Amazon cutting its own AGI model builders and Darrow displacing the legal analysts who trained its AI, except here the whole venture is contracting rather than a single function being automated.

Uphold cuts 85, 17% of staff, in a crypto-winter pivot to enterprise

Uphold, the New York-based digital asset trading platform, cut about 85 people, permanent staff and contractors, or roughly 17% of its global workforce, CoinDesk reported Monday. The company framed it as a strategic shift toward its fast-growing enterprise business, which lets banks, fintechs, and broker-dealers integrate crypto trading and custody through a single API.

The mechanism is the crypto cycle, not AI. Total cryptocurrency market capitalization fell to about $2.1 trillion at the end of the second quarter after three consecutive quarterly declines, and U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs recorded a combined $6.9 billion in net outflows across May and June. Weaker retail trading volumes are what made the enterprise reallocation "necessary," the company said. Uphold is not closing any offices and says its consumer roadmap, including U.S. stocks and tokenised securities by year-end, is unchanged.

CEO Simon McLoughlin called it "recalibrating after several years of extraordinary growth, during which we nearly doubled our headcount." That is the clean version of the crypto-pivot pattern seen this month at Polygon and Exodus: a wallet or trading shop trims consumer headcount to fund the infrastructure side of the business through a down market. No one blamed AI, and none of these cuts are AI substitution.

BuzzFeed cuts 35% of staff under new owner Byron Allen

BuzzFeed (NASDAQ: BZFD) is cutting about 35% of its employees and contractors, roughly 180 jobs across BuzzFeed including its HuffPost and Tasty divisions, Variety and Deadline reported Monday, citing an SEC filing. The company had 507 employees as of Dec. 31, 2025. BuzzFeed expects $6.5 million to $8.5 million in restructuring charges and $29 million to $32 million in annualized savings, and reports second-quarter earnings Aug. 4.

This is a digital-media cut, flagged like Disney, WPP, and Allianz rather than counted as pure tech, but the mechanism is worth noting because it is acquisition-driven, not AI-driven. Entrepreneur Byron Allen acquired a 51% stake for $120 million in a deal that closed in late May, and the filing's stated goal is a "path towards profitability and positive cash flow." Allen has said he wants to fold BuzzFeed and HuffPost into a free-streaming play alongside his Allen Media Group assets. The cost reset follows the ownership change, not a model replacement, and sits outside the tech-corporate tally for the same reason Disney's theatrical refocus did.

Tracking

Microsoft reports its fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday after the close, the first print since the July 6 cut of 4,800 roles, most of them in Xbox. Consensus is about $4.24 a share on roughly $87.6 billion in revenue. Xbox content and services were guided down in the low double digits, hardware down, and 1,600 of the 3,200 Xbox cuts are still scheduled through the fiscal year. It is the next real signal for the most-clicked storyline on this feed.

Two dates hold from earlier issues: the Xbox WARN separations become effective September 4 (id Software's 136 in Texas, ZeniMax Online's 213 in Maryland, Obsidian's 52 in California, and 605 in Washington), and Meta's preliminary injunction hearing is August 24, when the AI-selection question in the May layoff lawsuit returns with evidence after the Doan declaration left the central gap, whether AI-tool use shaped the performance scores that fed the cuts, conspicuously open.