TradeGecko lays off a quarter of its staff

TradeGecko, a Singapore-based startup selling inventory management software, has laid off 35 out of 125 employees, multiple sources familiar with the situation tell Tech in Asia.

The job cuts come after the company saw limited revenue growth despite ramping up sales and marketing spending, say the sources, who asked not to be named. Half of the startup’s sales team was affected.

TradeGecko’s Singapore team / Photo credit: TradeGecko

“These changes will enable us to reduce costs and maintain growth as we focus on building the number one inventory and order management platform for SMEs,” says TradeGecko’s CEO and co-founder Cameron Priest, who confirmed the layoffs in an email statement to Tech in Asia. “We are trying to help the affected individuals to find new roles.”

He adds that the company is on track to break even this year. It’s seeing an annual recurring revenue – sales that’s expected to come in from existing subscriptions – of over US$10 million.

TradeGecko was a standout graduate of JFDI, the first startup accelerator in Singapore, and had gone on to secure over US$20 million from investors. These included prominent Southeast Asian VCs like Openspace Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Golden Gate Ventures, and Jungle Ventures.

The startup raised a US$10 million series B round in 2018, and US$7.8 million of that amount was in the form of convertible notes. These will be due on March 31 this year if the company doesn’t list on the Australian Stock Exchange, its financial statement notes.

TradeGecko had indeed been planning to list on the exchange. However, the timeline was pushed back, according to the sources.

It’s unclear if the noteholders will extend the repayment deadline. The company is “working with all existing investors” on the matter, says Priest. TradeGecko has not attempted to raise a series C round.

Sources attributed the startup’s woes to mismanagement of the product and the sales process. TradeGecko’s numbers looked good when it was raising its series B round, even as it was losing nearly as much money as it was making, they point out.

TradeGecko is currently seeing an annual recurring revenue of over US$10 million.

To pursue growth, it branched out beyond its original focus of maintaining an inventory and order management software for online retailers.

The company built dozens of integrations with third-party tools into its software, but there was a problem. “While the core product capabilities were improving quite well, they were too complex for users to master on their own,” a source notes.

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