Brave lays off 9% of its workforce

Brave Software, the maker of Brave Browser and Search, confirmed that it has laid off 9% of its staff across departments.

The company didn’t specify how many people were affected, but it corroborated the development and said the decision was driven by the tough economic climate.

“Brave eliminated some positions as part of our cost management in this challenging economic environment. Several departments were affected, amounting to 9% of our staff,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.

The company has been taking steps to bolster its revenue sources this year. In April, Brave Search ditched Bing Index to start relying on its own indexing solution. In May, the company released its own search API for clients with plans starting from $3 per 1,000 queries. The API also offers different plans for AI data model training, data with storage rights, spellcheck, and autosuggest. Last month, Brave introduced image, news, and video results as a part of its Search API.

Brave has also been testing a native AI assistant called Leo for its browser. While it plans to make it available to all users, Brave said that Leo will have a premium tier with features like higher rate limits and access to more conversation models. The company noted that this will help it pay for the cost of API access and hosting.