Portland tech company Puppet laid off about 3 percent of its staff Thursday, according to a person with direct knowledge of the cuts. That amounts to fewer than 20 people altogether.

Puppet declined to confirm the number of layoffs but said "this realignment of our workforce will allow us to innovate more rapidly on behalf of our customers."

"As we enter into the next growth phase, we are ensuring our investments are focused on our most strategic priorities," Puppet said in a written statement.

Portland has a rapidly growing tech economy, driven largely by out-of-state businesses like Amazon, New Relic and Lithium, all of which are expanding their downtown offices. However, the city has relatively few large, independent tech companies based here.

Puppet has been among Portland's brightest stars with roughly 600 employees, most of them at its downtown headquarters.

Founded in 2005, the privately held company has raised $86 million in outside funding and its annual sales were approaching $100 million in 2016, the last year for which it reported financial results.

Puppet had been planning for a public stock offering in 2016 but shelved those plans as the IPO market cooled. The company has given no indication it plans to revive those IPO plans, despite resurgent investor enthusiasm for public offerings.

Founder and longtime chief executive Luke Kanies stepped down in 2016, replaced by Puppet President Sanjay Mirchandani, a former VMWare executive.

Puppet grew rapidly in the early years of this decade as companies moved more of their computing into large data centers and sought new tools to help manage that technology.

Observers, though, say "containers" - a new technique for running software inside a data center - has lowered demand for Puppet's tools and may have slowed the company's growth rate. Puppet offers its own tools for container management.

-- Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; 503-294-7699