Canadian technology giant Wealthsimple, valued at $ 4 billion last year, is laying off 159 people, or about 13% of its staff.
The Toronto-based company has been a leader in democratizing consumer financial products, such as stock trading, cryptocurrency sales, and peer-to-peer money transfers. And now it seems that Wealthsimple is an example of another company that experienced a boom during the early days of the pandemic and is now experiencing a slowdown in business.
CEO and co-founder Michael Katchen 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 that they have never experienced before.”
In the letter, he wrote:
If you’ve been with us for the past two years, you know it’s been a time of immense volatility. Almost anyone who made predictions about how the pandemic would affect the economy was wrong about one thing or another. Markets crashed. Then they fired. Our business has grown at an unprecedented rate and since then we have been building aggressively to meet the needs of a wave of new customers.
Of course, volatility works both ways, and we are now looking the other way as pandemic market conditions relate.
He added that the market change will result in the startup focusing more on core businesses such as investment and banking, as well as crypto. It will reduce your efforts in areas such as peer payments, taxes, and business services.
The move came a week after Wealthsimple enacted a hiring freeze, according to BetaKit.
Wealthsimple’s latest increase 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 had more than $ 10 billion in assets under management from the latest publicly available numbers. It has raised about $ 900 million over its lifetime, according to Crunchbase. Prior to today’s dismissal, it had 1,262 employees.
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