Nigerian Blockchain payment startup Lazerpay has disclosed plans to trim its workforce due to the unfriendly economic period.
The company battled with a financial crisis earlier this year after a lead investor pulled out of the seed round due to market conditions and disagreement on terms, which affected the company’s ability to complete the seed round, as it also struggled financially.
This prompted the management team to forfeit their salaries, while other members of the workforce had their salaries slashed in a bid to keep the company afloat.
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However, all these never yielded positive results as the firm was still trying to keep its head above water, which necessitated it to painfully part ways with some of its talented team members.
Commenting on this, the startup CEO Njoku Emmanuel said, “Earlier this year, we began raising our seed round and had interest from investors. Unfortunately, our proposed lead investor pulled out abruptly due to market conditions and disagreement on terms.
“This impacted our ability to complete this round. In a bid to extend our runway, our management team stopped taking a salary, and our employees graciously stayed on board with a pay cut over the past few months.
“Despite these sacrifices, in addition to changing our fundraising strategy and making the needed adjustments in the operations of the business, we are still faced with a hard decision to downsize and part ways with some incredibly talented members of our team.
“This is unrelated to the FTX collapse. Lazerpay did not hold any assets in FTX and, consequently, is unaffected. Our customers’ funds are safe, and the company will keep processing payments as normal.We remain firm in our mission to enable businesses to go global.”
Lazerpay, popularly known as Stripe for crypto, is a Nigerian crypto payment gateway startup that helps businesses accept crypto payments quickly and securely from anywhere in the world.
For online SMEs with limited tech infrastructure, the startup suite of solutions has enabled them to increase their access to the global market without additional infrastructure cost.
Founded in 2021, Lazerpay is backed by a selection of angel investors including 4DX Ventures, Nestcoin, Nuwa Capital, Voltron Capital, Musha Ventures, Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade, and Xend Finance CEO Ugochukwu Aronu.
Since launching in February, it has processed around US$1 million in transactions.