High-flying fintech Brex is making deep cuts to its workforce and reshuffling its executive suite to rein in costs and stem its cash burn amid slowing revenue.
The six-year-old fintech is laying off 282 employees, or around one-fifth of its workforce. The company confirmed the news in a blog post published Tuesday morning.
"We grew our org too quickly, making it harder to move at the speed we once did. This year, we decided to take a hard look at our current structure, and reduce the number of layers between leaders and the actual work that affects customers," Brex co-founder and co-CEO Pedro Franceschi wrote.
Two C-suite executives are also stepping away from their operational roles, the company confirmed. COO Michael Tannenbaum will move to the board and be succeeded by Camilla Morais, and CTO Cosmin Nicolaescu will become an advisor.
It's unclear whether Brex intends to hire a new CTO, but the company announced that James Reggio was being promoted to VP of engineering as part of the "flattening" of its management restructuring.
Brex has raised more than $1.2 billion since 2017 and was valued at $12 billion in 2021 when it was raising $320 million in a Series D extension round.
The company was based in San Francisco until 2020 when it left the city and shifted to a no-headquarters, remote-first strategy. Brex returned to the city last year when it opened a new office in SoMa.
Brex got a boost in business during the first half of 2023 when startups and venture capital firms scrambled to find alternative banking providers amid the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, but it doesn't appear to have been enough to keep costs down as the rest of the year unfolded
The fintech burned around $17 million a month in the last quarter of 2023, the Information first reported on Tuesday, leading to the deep cost cutting measures.
Employees who are impacted by the cuts will receive at least eight weeks of severance, depending on how long they were employed, six months of health coverage, early share vesting if they had been there less than a year and permission to keep their laptops.
