Another San Francisco technology startup has laid off hundreds of staff members this week, adding to a mounting late-year tally of cut tech workers.
Around 250 total employees across San Francisco e-commerce company Faire—20% of the total staff count—are part of the job cuts.
“We've restructured the company to better align our teams with our long-term vision,” the Faire spokesperson said in a statement confirming the layoffs. “We built our former organizational structure with multiple layers of management to support our pace of hiring. When we slowed down hiring last year, naturally we weren’t able to grow into that larger structure.”
Faire, whose headquarters are in SoMa, bills itself as a wholesale marketplace for independent retailers—selling upscale wares in bulk to smaller companies.
The teams impacted included the engineering, product and data divisions of the company. In recent tech industry layoffs, technical workers have often been spared, while recruiting and sales departments have been harder hit.
This is Faire’s first round of layoffs in 2023, but about 7% of company staff were cut last October. The company was valued at more than $12.5 billion last May after raising $416 million more in a Series G financing round.
A company spokesperson declined to provide any details about severance, but posters on the anonymous tech forum Blind said that the benefits for laid-off workers were good.
This is the second notable layoff round announced by a San Francisco tech company this week: Splunk announced that hundreds of staff members, about 7% of its headcount, would be laid off just weeks after securing an acquisition by Cisco.
In October, Qualcomm announced it was laying off 1,258 California workers—including almost 200 in the Bay Area, according to regulatory filings.