U.K. payment firm, GoCardless is laying off nearly 15%, slashing 135 parts of its workforce

June 14, 2023: The British fintech unicorn GoCardless backed by Alphabet, has stated it will reduce its global workforce by 15%, slashing 135 roles to slash costs.

The redundancies will affect posts in the U.K., U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, reducing senior leadership by 25% and the company’s workforce to just under 800. A separate 15 roles will be transferred from Britain to the Latvian capital Riga.

Founded in 2011, London-headquartered GoCardless processes direct debit payments and recurring transactions withdrawn from a customer’s bank account for subscriptions and invoices for its business clients.

The slashes are part of the company’s plans to lower costs by 15%, CEO Hiroki Takeuchi said in a statement on Monday that the GoCardless business strategy will not change “fundamentally.”

The payments firm most recently raised $312 million in a Series G funding round in February, earning a $2.1 billion valuation. Its backers include Alphabet’s venture capital investment arm GV, BlackRock, and Permira.

Takeuchi painted an optimistic picture of the firm’s prospects despite the layoffs.

“We can see that our revenue will continue to grow strongly, and the changes we are announcing today will get us within touching distance of profitability shortly. This will make us one of the few technology companies that are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, growing fast, and being profitable,” he said.

The decision comes amid rising pressure in the tech startup sector, where funding has been skydiving and remains on track to shed another 39% to just 51 billion in 2023, down from $83 billion in 2022, according to venture capital firm Atomico.

Takeuchi mentioned the firm’s renewed focus on profitability to CNBC in comments at the Money 20/20 conference last week.

“We need to be disciplined; we need to be careful and be more cautious about how we’re deploying our investments and make sure that we’re driving that growth more profitably,” he said.