Unicorn cutbacks: Lightricks to lay off 80 employees - 12% of workforce
Lightricks is the latest in a growing list of unicorns to lay off employees despite having hundreds of millions of dollars in their account, joining the likes of Cybereason, Trax, and Snyk
Jerusalem-based unicorn Lightricks is laying off 80 employees, 70 of them in Israel. The layoffs amount to around 12% of the company’s workforce, which numbers 680 employees based out of offices in Israel, U.S., China and the UK.
Lightricks, which raised a $130 million funding round at a $1.8 billion valuation last September, also notified its employees earlier today that it will be making other cutbacks in addition to the layoffs, including minimizing marketing and operational costs, so that it can reduce the cash burn rate and avoid a situation in which it would need to raise more funding in the coming years. The company said that it would help employees who are leaving to find new work through an employment agency that will support them.
Lightricks was founded in 2013 by five Ph.D. students: Zeev Farbman, Nir Pochter, Yaron Inger, Amit Goldstein, and a former Supreme Court of Israel clerk, Itai Tsiddon. Lightricks’ suite of mobile apps for image and video editing have over 500 million downloads worldwide, with its creativity apps currently including editing tools for social media such as Facetune2, Facetune Video, and Filtertune, general creativity photo and video editing tools such as Videoleap, Motionleap, Photoleap, Artleap, Lightleap, and Beatleap, and the Boosted app which is Lightricks’ social media toolkit for small businesses.
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“Due to the situation in the markets and the global financial crisis, we need to secure the company’s long-term success while realizing its strategy and maintaining the current financial stability which is why we are currently halting projects that don’t support our strategy and accelerating other projects, as a result of which we are forced to cut some of the positions in the company,” said Zeev Farbman. “We will also cut our marketing and operational costs, but we will do so while maintaining our employees’ conditions. We are committed to supporting the employees who will be leaving and helping them find a job.”
Lightricks is the latest in a growing list of unicorns to lay off employees despite having hundreds of millions of dollars in their account, joining the likes of Cybereason, Trax, and Snyk.
