Chipper Cash, an African platform for international payments, laid off another 12.5% of its workforce last Friday, just ten weeks after laying off the previous 12.5%. (affecting its engineering team the most).
Chipper Cash’s VP of Engineering, Erin Fusaro, revealed that many of her close friends and colleagues in the engineering leadership, engineers, technical programme managers, analysts, and IT departments were among those let go.
A third of the company’s 350 employees have reportedly been laid off, making this layoff unprecedented in scale. Every single division at Chipper Cash has been impacted. Business management, among other functions, is reportedly now run by a single individual.
The Vice President of Revenue for Chipper Cash confirmed the news on LinkedIn. Lamenting over what happened, he wrote, “Many talented people were let go.” “They are all highly experienced in managing very complex, multicultural teams and projects in fintech. All areas have been impacted, from Recruiting, HR, Marketing, Pricing, Product, Analytics, UX, Research, Legal, and more,” the V.P’s post read.
There are rumours that the crypto team was disbanded too. Chipper Cash has ruled this off completely. “Chipper is one of the largest crypto platforms in Africa today, and it remains one of our fastest-growing products. We are excited about the future of crypto in Africa and continue to invest in the product,” CEO Ham Serunjogi said, in a statement to TechCrunch.
Chipper Cash raised a total of $250 million, the first $100 million coming in a Series C funding round led by SVB Capital in May 2021, and the second $150 million coming in an extension six months later. The extension round was led by FTX, a now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange platform. It gave $40 million to the round, which pushed Chipper Cash’s valuation to $2 billion and made it one of Africa’s five unicorns.
The company returned to the market in 2022 to raise additional capital, likely as a buffer to navigate the current macroeconomic environment.
Chipper Cash could have been forced to accept a down round, documents showing that the company received an additional $35 million in SAFE from FTX at a valuation of $1.25 billion.
The recent layoffs at Chipper Cash follow those at Jumia and Luno. The former laid off 900 of its workforce while Luno was 35%.
