Startups

Stripe has laid off employees behind TaxJar, a tax compliance startup it acquired last year

Comment

GettyImages 527013168
Image Credits: Matthias Oesterle/Corbis / Getty Images

Stripe has laid off some of the employees who support TaxJar, a tax compliance startup that it acquired last year, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources and firsthand documentation.

The layoffs — conducted over the last month — are related to Stripe’s decision to wind down TaxJar-focused go-to-market efforts in late July. Sources estimate the number of employees impacted by the workforce reduction is between 45 and 55 folks, at least a portion of whom were invited to take 30 days to apply to internal jobs at Stripe.

TechCrunch reached out to Stripe for confirmation, and a spokesperson said the company declined to comment. According to LinkedIn, TaxJar’s co-founder Matt Anderson left Stripe in July, followed by folks in the sales, marketing and partnerships teams. Anderson did not immediately respond to request for comment

Stripe bought TaxJar, a provider of a cloud-based suite of tax services, in April 2021 to help its customers “automatically calculate, report and file sales taxes.” At that time, Stripe told TechCrunch that all 200 employees of the Massachusetts-based business were joining the company. The goal of the acquisition was to integrate sales tax collection and remittance as a service, one of the most requested features among users.

In July, Stripe went through a 409A valuation process that saw its internal valuation cut by 28%. The rich company is valued by investors at $95 billion, but the implied new internal share price is around $74 billion. While valuation cuts are often viewed as a negative event for a company — industry experts argued that a lower 409A valuation, which is set by a third party and is different from what venture capitalists measure — they make it cheaper for employees to exercise vested options.

Stripe’s new and lower internal valuation, explained

Fintech hasn’t been immune to the downturn — for evidence, you need to look no further than the stock prices of Block (formerly Square), PayPal, Robinhood and Affirm. Global fintech funding in the second quarter of 2022 fell 33% to $20.4 billion across 1,225 deals in Q2 from Q1 2022, per CB Insights, and declined nearly 46% from the $37.6 billion raised across 1,287 deals in Q2 2021.

It’s a similar story looking at some players within the startup world. On Deck, a venture-backed startup accelerator that invests in other companies, recently cut 25% of staff and scaled back its accelerator program. Then, months later, it cut a third of staff. MainStreet, fresh off of layoffs itself, underwent a recapitalization from some investors. The company was just valued at $500 million last year for its platform that helps startups uncover tax credits.

Also, one-click checkout startup Bolt laid off at least 180 employees and counting across go-to-market, sales and recruiting roles. That move came just a month after its closest competitor, Fast, shut down due to high burn.

In the late-stage world, buy now, pay later platform Klarna laid off 10% of its workforce, and then had its valuation slashed by 85% — from $45.6 billion in July of 2021 to $6.7 billion in July of this year.

Current and former Stripe and TaxJar employees can reach out to Natasha Mascarenhas at natasha.m@techcrunch.com, or Signal, a secure messaging app, at (925) 271 0912.

Six conversations that bring nuance to tech’s layoff wave

More TechCrunch

It’s not often that you hear about a seed round above $10 million. H, a startup based in Paris and previously known as Holistic AI, has announced a $220 million…

French AI startup H raises $220 million seed round

Hey there, Series A to B startups with $35 million or less in funding — we’ve got an exciting opportunity that’s tailor-made for your growth journey! If you’re looking to…

Boost your startup’s growth with a ScaleUp package at TC Disrupt 2024

TikTok is pulling out all the stops to prevent its impending ban in the United States. Aside from initiating legal challenges against the government, that means shaping up its public…

As a U.S. ban looms, TikTok announces a $1M program for socially driven creators

Microsoft wants to put its Copilot everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft renames its annual Build developer conference to Microsoft Copilot. Hopefully, some of those upcoming events…

Microsoft’s Power Automate no-code platform adds AI flows

Build is Microsoft’s largest developer conference and of course, it’s all about AI this year. So it’s no surprise that GitHub’s Copilot, GitHub’s “AI pair programming tool,” is taking center…

GitHub Copilot gets extensions

Microsoft wants to make its brand of generative AI more useful for teams — specifically teams across corporations and large enterprise organizations. This morning at its annual Build dev conference,…

Microsoft intros a Copilot for teams

Microsoft’s big focus at this year’s Build conference is generative AI. And to that end, the tech giant announced a series of updates to its platforms for building generative AI-powered…

Microsoft upgrades its AI app-building platforms

The UK’s data protection watchdog has closed an almost year-long investigation of Snap’s AI chatbot, My AI — saying it’s satisfied the social media firm has addressed concerns about risks…

UK data protection watchdog ends privacy probe of Snap’s GenAI chatbot, but warns industry

U.S. cell carrier Patriot Mobile experienced a data breach that included subscribers’ personal information, including full names, email addresses, home zip codes, and account PINs, TechCrunch has learned. Patriot Mobile,…

Conservative cell carrier Patriot Mobile hit by data breach

It’s been three years since Spotify acquired live audio startup Betty Labs, and yet the music streaming service isn’t leveraging the technology to its fullest potential—at least not in our…

Spotify’s ‘Listening Party’ feature falls short of expectations

Alchemist Accelerator has a new pile of AI-forward companies demoing their wares today, if you care to watch, and the program itself is making some international moves into Tokyo and…

Alchemist’s latest batch puts AI to work as accelerator expands to Tokyo, Doha

“Late Pledge” allows campaign creators to continue collecting money even after the campaign has closed.

Kickstarter now lets you pledge after a campaign closes

Stack AI’s co-founders, Antoni Rosinol and Bernardo Aceituno, were PhD students at MIT wrapping up their degrees in 2022 just as large language models were becoming more mainstream. ChatGPT would…

Stack AI wants to make it easier to build AI-fueled workflows

Pinecone, the vector database startup founded by Edo Liberty, the former head of Amazon’s AI Labs, has long been at the forefront of helping businesses augment large language models (LLMs)…

Pinecone launches its serverless vector database out of preview

Young geothermal energy wells can be like budding prodigies, each brimming with potential to outshine their peers. But like people, most decline with age. In California, for example, the amount…

Special mud helps XGS Energy get more power out of geothermal wells

The market play is clear from the outset: The $449 headphones are firmly targeted at an audience that would otherwise be purchasing the Bose QC Ultra or Apple AirPods Max.

Sonos finally made some headphones

Adobe says the feature is up to the task, regardless of how complex of a background the object is set against.

Adobe brings Firefly AI-powered Generative Remove to Lightroom

All cars suffer when the mercury drops, but electric vehicles suffer more than most as heaters draw more power and batteries charge more slowly as the liquid electrolyte inside thickens.…

Porsche Ventures invests in battery startup South 8 to boost cold-weather EV performance

Scale AI has raised a $1 billion Series F round from a slew of big-name institutional and corporate investors including Amazon and Meta.

Data-labeling startup Scale AI raises $1B as valuation doubles to $13.8B

The new coalition, Tech Against Scams, will work together to find ways to fight back against the tools used by scammers and to better educate the public against financial scams.

Meta, Match, Coinbase and others team up to fight online fraud and crypto scams

It’s a wrap: European Union lawmakers have given the final approval to set up the bloc’s flagship, risk-based regulations for artificial intelligence.

EU Council gives final nod to set up risk-based regulations for AI

London-based fintech Vitesse has closed a $93 million Series C round of funding led by investment giant KKR.

Vitesse, a payments and treasury management platform for insurers, raises $93M to fuel US expansion

Zen Educate, an online marketplace that connects schools with teachers, has raised $37 million in a Series B round of funding. The raise comes amid a growing teacher shortage crisis…

Zen Educate raises $37M and acquires Aquinas Education as it tries to address the teacher shortage

“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.”

Scarlett Johansson says that OpenAI approached her to use her voice

A new self-driving truck — manufactured by Volvo and loaded with autonomous vehicle tech developed by Aurora Innovation — could be on public highways as early as this summer.  The…

Aurora and Volvo unveil self-driving truck designed for a driverless future

The European venture capital firm raised its fourth fund as fund as climate tech “comes of age.”

ETF Partners raises €285M for climate startups that will be effective quickly — not 20 years down the road

Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.

Microsoft wants to make Windows an AI operating system, launches Copilot+ PCs

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. For those who haven’t heard, the first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has been pushed back yet again to no earlier than…

TechCrunch Space: Star(side)liner

When I attended Automate in Chicago a few weeks back, multiple people thanked me for TechCrunch’s semi-regular robotics job report. It’s always edifying to get that feedback in person. While…

These 81 robotics companies are hiring

The top vehicle safety regulator in the U.S. has launched a formal probe into an April crash involving the all-electric VinFast VF8 SUV that claimed the lives of a family…

VinFast crash that killed family of four now under federal investigation