Cameo is getting ready to close its next raise.
According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Friday, the Chicago celebrity shoutout app is raising a $28 million round.
The new funding values the company at less than $100 million, reported The Information, representing a significant drop from its $1 billion valuation in 2021.
While CEO Steven Galanis would not confirm the company's new valuation in a conversation with Chicago Inno on Monday, he did say that Cameo was in a far better spot today than it was last summer.
A decline in the venture capital market following the highs of 2021 forced many tech startups, including Cameo, to totally change their playbook as valuations plummeted.
"When you look at publicly traded consumer marketplace businesses, valuations plunged in a big way," Galanis said. "The average was about 75% in valuation, and when you get to be a growth-stage company, investors are really looking at the public company comps. It just became clear we needed to cut to profitability."
Part of that path to profitability included a round of layoffs that took place last July. The Chicago startup laid off 80 employees in 2023 after two rounds of layoffs in 2022.
"That was a painful one, but we've started hiring back people that had been part of previous layoffs so we're excited about that," Galanis said.
Throughout 2022 and 2023, layoffs affected more than 400,000 tech employees, according to Layoffs.fyi. So far in 2024, 219 tech companies have laid off more than 50,000 employees.
Still, Galanis feels the new funding sets Cameo up well moving forward.
"The round is oversubscribed so we'll close the whole $28 million, but we've so far closed like $25.7 million," he said. "The business is profitable and has been growing for the last eight months, and we had to raise to renegotiate venture debt we had taken on a couple of years ago. It's not that the business needed more money to scale — we needed to raise to push out the debt we have."
In the meantime, he said, "This round sets us up extremely well in both the short-term and long-term and we feel bullish about where the business is. We have everything we need to win again and we're excited to keep building."
