Less than a week after Convoy announced its closure, the freight network startup disclosed 533 layoffs in Seattle, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filed Tuesday with the state of Washington.
The WARN comes after Convoy co-founder and CEO Dan Lewis on Thursday said the company was shutting down its core business and it would be most employees' last day with the company. Lewis at the time also said some employees would stay on to help with "this windup transition and potential future strategic options."
Convoy didn't reply Tuesday to an email asking how many total employees remain at the company. Emails to two media contacts at Convoy bounced. The Seattle Times reported on Tuesday that Convoy had found a buyer, and the deal is expected to close soon.
Convoy hit a valuation of $3.8 billion in April 2022 after raising $260 million between equity funding and venture debt. At that time, Chief Growth Officer Ryan Gavin said Convoy had about 1,300 employees, including more than 800 in Washington.
Since then, Convoy conducted four rounds of layoffs and closed its Atlanta office as the freight market struggled. The company had just under 790 employees listed on LinkedIn when the shutdown was announced.
Convoy, founded in 2015, connected shippers to trucking companies to reduce the number of empty miles truck drivers spend on the road. Carriers, meanwhile, could find and bid on loads through an app. Convoy had clients like Unilever, The Home Depot and Anheuser-Busch.
Early investors in Convoy included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and former Starbucks President Howard Behar.
On Sunday, Lewis took to LinkedIn to talk about the final months at Convoy. In a response to a post about the challenges of selling a company, Lewis said he is busy working on the next steps for what remains of Convoy, and the company had "credible inbound interest earlier this year" for an acquisition.
"We had strong relationships with other companies who periodically asked about deals," Lewis wrote on LinkedIn. "It was a warm start vs. just calling around. We got to the actual 1/2 yard line in a couple months, and then again. Something happened. We reset and expanded. There was no lack of interest in how the tech and biz worked."
He also said in the post the freight recession added to Convoy's burn rate and hurt potential acquirers.
