Spokeswoman confirmed that employees in all regions were affected, but that no further rounds should follow.
Because the times require it: When asked by Gründerszene, a spokeswoman for the Berlin software unicorn Contentful confirmed that around 50 people had to be laid off in the past two weeks. She speaks of a “small number of positions” that were eliminated in order to be able to focus on the most important areas of focus as a company “in a rapidly changing industry”: “Contentful continues to adapt to market conditions and carefully weighs between growth and efficiency to ensure long-term success.”
According to the company in summer 2022, around 750 people have worked for Contentful so far, 350 of them in a newly opened office in Berlin, the others in the San Francisco, Denver locations – or remotely. According to the spokeswoman, the wave of layoffs affected employees in all regions to the same extent.
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Top customers and top investors
The company, which Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri founded in Berlin in 2012, offers headless CMS systems that are now used by the largest companies worldwide, such as Siemens, Plaid, Danone, Bang & Olufsen, Zalando and N26. Spotify, Heineken, Wework, Chanel and Tui. According to their own statement, 30 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on Contentful. The software offers you the opportunity to edit and update the content of all of the company's digital presences, apps and websites, quickly and without programming yourself.
In the summer of 2021, Contentful broke the unicorn mark with a Series F financing of 148 million. The valuation at that time was around three billion dollars (2.5 billion euros). Investors include Tiger Global, Sapphire Ventures, General Catalyst and Salesforce Ventures, Tidemark, Balderton Capital, Benchmark, Hercules and Point Nine Capital.
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2023 – the year of tech cancellations
2023 had already begun with a massive wave of layoffs at tech companies, followed throughout the year by news of layoffs at startups such as Staffbase, Taxfix, McMakler and Spotify. The comparatively small group at Contentful now fits in. Experts consider the development to be less threatening than much more necessary: Many companies still have to recover from the high of the boom year 2021, in which too much capital on the market and an extreme focus on the tech industry led to unsustainable growth for many startups .
“Decisions that impact employees are never taken lightly,” the Contentful spokeswoman assures Gründerszene. Your company supports all affected employees. “While things can always change, we currently have no plans for a further series of cuts across the company.”
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Source: https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/technologie/software-unicorn-contentful-entlaesst-50-mitarbeitende/
