Lunchbox, one of the most prominent and outspoken tech companies in the delivery space, announced a significant round of layoffs just months after acquiring NovaDine and receiving $50 million through a Series B investment round.
Company co-founder and CEO Nabeel Alamgir announced the layoffs in a post on LinkedIn, and said it was “an incredibly difficult decision to reduce our workforce.” The post said employees in the engineering, customer success, marketing and delivery departments were all impacted.
“These were friends, colleagues and parents,” Alamgir added. “My priority right now is to help out our former employees in any way possible.”
It’s a sharp change of fortune for the New York-based company that acquired enterprise ordering provider NovaDine in June and recently debuted a free online ordering platform for restaurants with one to three locations.
Altogether, Lunchbox has raised $72 million in its three-year history, and its headcount was reportedly 180 at its recent peak.
“We are all drunk on VC capital, and we needed to sober up,” Alamgir said in an interview with Insider.
It’s the latest significant headcount reduction among several in the industry, joining other restaurant tech companies including Nextbite, Reef, Gopuff and Sunday.
Speaking with Food On Demand after its $50 million fundraising round last spring, Alamgir said it was already adapting as the “price of cash” increased as investors tightened their belts.
“I am excited for us to not depend on knowing, so we’re going to slow down in some areas,” he said at the time. “You’re going to see a company that’s going to have to make hard decisions to be disciplined, and I have a proper leadership team around me that can help do that, that can make those difficult decisions, and we are going to hold onto cash tighter than we did last year, and all startups should.”
