Wealthsimple, valued at $4B last year, joins the fintech layoffs list

Roboadviser Wealthsimple, which was valued at $4 billion as of last year, is laying off 159 people – or about 13% of its staff.

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. 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. 

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.”

In the missive, he wrote:

Wealthsimple’s last raise was a $610 million round led by Meritech 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.