Nigerian Blockchain payments startup Lazerpay has revealed plans to trim its workforce due to the unfriendly economic period.
The company struggled with a financial crisis earlier this year after a lead investor pulled out of the seed round due to market conditions and disagreement over terms, which affected the company’s ability to complete the seed round as it also struggled financially.
This caused the management team to lose their pay, while other members of the workforce had their pay cut in an attempt to keep the company afloat.
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But all these never yielded positive results as the firm was still trying to keep its head above water, necessitating painful parting ways with some of its talented team members.
Commenting on this, the startup CEO Njoku Emmanuel said, “Earlier this year we started raising our seed round and had interest from investors. Unfortunately, our proposed lead investor pulled out abruptly due to market conditions and disagreement over terms.
“This affected our ability to complete this round. In an effort to extend our runway, the management team stopped taking a salary and our employees stayed on board with pay cuts for the past few months.
“Despite these sacrifices, in addition to changing our fundraising strategy and making the necessary adjustments to our business operations, we still face the difficult decision to downsize and part ways with some incredibly talented members of our team.
“This is not related to the FTX collapse. Lazerpay had no assets in FTX and is therefore unaffected. Our customers’ funds are safe and the company will continue to process payments as normal. We remain steadfast in our mission to enable businesses to go global.”
Lazerpay, popularly known as Stripe for crypto, is a Nigerian crypto payment gateway startup that helps businesses accept crypto payments quickly and securely from anywhere in the world.
For web-based SMEs with limited technological infrastructure, the startup suite of solutions has enabled them to increase their access to the global market without additional infrastructure costs.
Lazerpay was founded in 2021 and is backed by a selection of angel investors including 4DX Ventures, Nestcoin, Nuwa Capital, Voltron Capital, Musha Ventures, Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade and Xend Finance CEO Ugochukwu Aronu.
Since its launch in February, it has processed around $1 million in transactions.
