Canadian fintech giant Wealthsimple, valued at $ 4 billion last year, is laying off 159 people – or about 13 percent of its staff.
The Toronto-based company is a leader in democratizing consumer financial products, including stock trading, crypto asset sales and money transfers. And now Wealthsimple seems to be an example of another company that experienced a boom in the early days of the pandemic and is now seeing a slowdown in business.
CEO and co-founder Michael Kutchen addressed the move in a letter to employees, which was published as a blog post, noting that Wealthsimple customers “are experiencing a period of market uncertainty they have never experienced before.”
In the message he wrote:
If you’ve been with us for the last two years, you know it’s been a time of great instability. Almost everyone who predicted how the pandemic would affect the economy was wrong about one thing or another. Markets collapsed. Then they rose. Our business is growing at an unprecedented rate and since then we have been developing aggressively to meet the needs of a wave of new customers.
Of course, volatility is working in both directions, and now we see its other side as the market conditions of the pandemic relax.
He added that the change in the market will lead the start-up to focus more on key businesses such as investing and banking, as well as cryptocurrency. It will reduce its efforts in areas such as peer-to-peer payments, tax and trade services.
The move came a week after Wealthsimple froze hiring, according to BetaKit.
Wealthsimple’s last raise was a $ 610 million round led by Meritech and Greylock. At the time, the company said it had more than 1.5 million users and more than $ 10 billion in assets under management as of the latest publicly available numbers. He has raised about $ 900 million in his lifetime, according to Crunchbase. Prior to today’s dismissal, it had 1,262 employees.
My weekly fintech newsletter, The Interchange, launches on May 1st! register here to get it in your inbox.
Add Comment