Fintech-focused VC firm Anthemis Group is laying off 28% of staff as part of restructuring

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Anthemis Group is undergoing a restructuring that resulted in it letting go of 16 employees, or roughly 28% of its workforce, earlier this year, the fintech-focused venture firm confirmed to TechCrunch.

A spokesperson for London-based Anthemis said the move was an attempt “to better reflect current market conditions and position the business for future growth” against its “strategic priorities.”

The firm declined to say which roles were affected in the restructuring, but a source who spoke on condition of anonymity pointed to Farhan Lalji, a former managing director at the firm, as one of the group being laid off, in addition to early-stage investors. Swarnali Mitra and a person who acted as both one content and editorial manager. TechCrunch reached out to all three employees, but did not receive a response. However, their LinkedIn profiles indicate that they are no longer with Anthemis as of January and February of this year.

Since the layoffs, Anthemis says it has two new hires — a chief investment officer and head of intellectual capital — and currently has a team of 44 across Europe and North America. In April 2021, Jillian Williams left the role of Chief Investment Officer at Anthemis to join Cowboy Ventures as a Partner. She joined Anthemis in July 2016 and helped open the American office in New York.

Anthemis was founded in 2010 and currently has $1.5 billion in assets under management. The firm in late 2021 announced that it had raised $700 million in new funding in what the spokesperson described as “a pool of capital” it closed “across strategies” from the venture studio to the venture growth fund.

The company can now limit its efforts.

“Our focus, now more than ever, is to deploy financial, intellectual and human capital in the service of improving and reinventing the financial system,” the spokesperson said this month. “And I would say the strategy continues to evolve.” She said Anthemis remains committed to supporting diverse founders and continues to “explore complementary products” within the asset management business.

This is not the first time in recent years that a venture capital firm has let go of employees. In June last year, Backstage Capital revealed that it had reduced its staff from 12 to three people after halting new net investment. Usually, though, it’s pretty unusual for a venture firm to lay off so many people at once.

Anthemis declined to provide further details on its strategy going forward or comment on returns, instead pointing me to this blog posts from co-founder Amy Nauiokas. In the post, Nauiokas writes that the company aims to “ttranslates 2022’s bill in private markets into lasting change in the structure and method of early investments.”

She added: “With interest rates rising in Western economies, will The ‘search for yield’ that has sustained an era of our business has officially come to an end.”

So far this year, Anthemis has publicly announced a few new investments, including: Fly past, Raise (main investor), Green kick and Agreed. That too announced a follow-on investment in Herd. The company has also seen a couple of exits, i.a Power is acquired by Marqeta and Goji is picked up by Euroclear. Other companies in the portfolio include social investment app eToro, investment and savings app Betterment and insurtech Vouch.

But in the past year, Anthemis has also seen a couple of portfolio companies stumble. In November, the controversy surrounding the sudden departure of three of Pipe’s co-founders, including the CEO, raised eyebrows. And more recently, LGBTQ+-focused digital bank Daylight filed a lawsuit of three former employees “alleging age and pay discrimination, whistleblower retaliation and fraud.”

Meanwhile, Anthemis is also “actively fundraising,” the spokesperson confirmed, but said the firm could not comment on those efforts beyond that. It also declined to comment in response to a claim by an affected employee that the recent layoffs were related to challenges in obtaining capital commitments.due to lower returns than the top quartile.”

A person who wished to remain anonymous confirmed to TechCrunch that she was notified about a week before she was due to start a new position at the firm in January that the company had “restructured” and that the role she was supposed to start “no longer exists”. However, she says that she was “perfectly fine with the way it was handled and how I was treated.”

The company’s current restructuring is not the first time there has been a management shake-up. The firm also made headlines in 2018 when its then CEO and co-founder NAdeem Shaikh resigned after allegedly being the target of a complaint of sexual harassment by a female employee.

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