I think, motivation would have been, if they were able to sell themselves as 200 person company, the CEO and Board would gotten a bigger piece of the pie in the landing space.
As I pointed out elsewhere the 200 person company is not accurate. The OP is quoting something listed as "peak" on Linkedin without even providing a reference. And for some reason everyone is running with that figure. Nearly every tech company had a peak headcount during the height of Covid. Techcrunch generally also has inaccurate tech company numbers in their profiles. Also you can't sell yourself as a 200 person company if you don't actually have 200 people as that would come out immediately in any due diligence an acquiring company would would do on you.
