Robinhood, the trading app that popularized one-click trading and helped fuel last year’s meme stock frenzy has taken. hit this year, on Tuesday it announced that it was laying off about 23 percent of its work force. As first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by TechCrunch. The layoff comes just three months after Robinhood cut 9% of full-time staff.
At the time of its last layoffs in late April, it is believed that Robinhood had about 3,100 employees after letting go of around 300 workers. Doing the math, a 23% reduction in staff would amount to about 713 employees affected, leaving roughly 2,400 employees currently employed at the company
Shares of the company were off 0.7% in after-hours trading Tuesday.
Tenov said in the post that Robinhood
“staffed many of our operations functions under the assumption that the heightened retail engagement we had been seeing with the stock and crypto markets in the COVID era would persist into 2022,” and that the company now has “more staffing than appropriate.”
The layoffs are expected to impact employees in all functions, but mostly those in operations, marketing and program management. The blog post came after a companywide meeting and indicated that staffers would learn of their status via email and Slack “immediately” after that meeting so that employees “don’t have to wait for clarity.”
Robinhood's easy-to-use interface made it a hit among young investors trading from home on cryptocurrencies and stocks such as GameStop Corp during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, the company has posted declines in revenue as its customer base has been spooked by rising interest rates and decades-high inflation.