Canadian fintech giant Wealthsimple, which was valued at $4 billion as of last year, is laying off 159 people – or about 13% of its staff.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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The Toronto-based company has been a leader in the realm of democratizing financial products for consumers, including stock trading, crypto asset sales and peer-to-peer money transfers.
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And now it appears that Wealthsimple is an example of another company that experienced a boom during the early days of the pandemic and is now seeing a slowdown in business.
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CEO and Co-founder Michael Katchen addressed the move in a letter to employees, which was published as a blog post, noting that Wealthsimple’s clients “are living through a period of market uncertainty they’ve never experienced before.”⠀
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Wealthsimple’s last raise was a $610 million round led by Meritech Capital and Greylock. ⠀
At the time, the company said it had over 1.5 million users, and had over $10 billion in assets under management as of the last publicly available numbers. ⠀
It has raised about $900 million over its lifetime, according to Crunchbase. ⠀
Prior to today’s layoff, it had 1,262 employees.⠀
Text Credit: Techcrunch
