Tech companies in Ontario are laying off tons of workers and they're not done yet
Tech companies have laid off 150,000 people across North America, and there will likely be even more cuts in the months to come.
Several Ontario and Toronto-based tech companies are attributing the pressure of market conditions, rising interest rates, inflation, and the state of the fundraising market as reasons for laying off employees.
Just last month, Toronto-based real estate technology company, Properly, laid off approximately 71 employees.
Tech experiencing so much layoffs. Sad to see this happening. #Toronto
— Joallore (@clickflickca) October 13, 2022
CEO Ashnul Ruparell wrote a letter to the company's employees that read, "I am accountable for the decision to expand our team to support a level of scale and growth that is now clear will not materialize in the forseeable future."
On Nov. 1, the CEO of Toronto-based software company TealBook wrote in a letter to its employees that, "we expect several tech companies in our space to run out of capital over the next 12 to 18 months." The company laid off 34 employees, comprising 19 per cent of its workforce.
Another Toronto-based tech startup, Swift Medical, announced last month that it was laying off "a group of immensely smart and talented folks" across its sales, marketing and enginering teams.
The wound care management company's senior talent acquisition partner shared the devastating news in a LinkedIn post, writing "for the past few months, I have been a nervous spectator of the layoffs in the tech community...hoping and praying we weather these storms!"
Another Toronto fintech firm, Koho, laid off 15 people across its Instant Pay product and user success teams recently. Similarly, Toronto-based healthtech company, League, laid off approximately seven per cent of staff, according to several LinkedIn posts from employees.
Other layoffs include 11 per cent of staff at Kitchener-based tech company Communitech, seven per cent of staff at Waterloo-based Faire, five per cent of workforce at D2L Inc., and 78 employees from Toronto-based tech firm Ada.
Perhaps most notably, employees at Twitter have been hit with widespread layoffs amid the new ownership of the social media company by Elon Musk. Approximately 250 Twitter employees reside in Canada, and two of the company's senior leaders in Canada have already departed.
Musk claimed there was "no choice" but to make the layoffs, claiming the social media giant was losing $4 million USD a day.
Amazon also recently laid off 10,000 staff worldwide, including many Canadians who were developers for Amazon's voice controlled assistant device, Alexa.
Fareen Karim
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