A 7-year-old e-commerce startup catering to small businesses is laying off close to one-third of its workforce.
Shogun Labs, also known simply as Shogun, is cutting its headcount by 30%, or 48 people, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks technology industry layoffs.
According to both PitchBook and LinkedIn, the company has around 250 employees. That would put the cuts closer to 20% of its workforce.
Shogun didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The company was founded in 2015 by Nick Raushenbush and CEO Finbarr Taylor, and they went through Y Combinator's accelerator program in 2018.
It builds e-commerce storefronts for smaller direct-to-consumer brands. It‘s part of a growing trend toward so-called headless commerce where one company, in this case Shogun, creates the front-end experience for consumers, while the back-end e-commerce technology is powered by other companies like Shopify.
It raised a Series C round in 2021 that brought its total funding to more than $114 million and valued the company at $587.5 million, according to PitchBook.
In 2020, TechCrunch reported that Shogun had 11,000 customers.
On Tuesday, employee posts on LinkedIn indicated there was a corporate restructuring that had impacted Shogun's design team, as well as some technical workers.
Shogun is based in San Francisco, according to the terms of service on its website, although its most recent filings with California's Secretary of State indicate a location in Los Angeles County.
Globally, there have been layoffs at more than 600 tech companies in 2022 that have impacted over 100,000 people, according to TrueUp’s layoff tracker.
A different tech layoff tracking site, Layoffs.fyi, has a more conservative estimate, though. It shows a little more than 500 companies have laid off around 68,000 employees this year.
Tech companies based in the Bay Area, including startups and public companies, have cut at least 13,000 jobs this year, according to an analysis by Bay Area Inno. That figure includes a company's total labor force cuts, not just those within the Bay Area.
