One-time unicorn SellerX, which buys and helps e-commerce businesses grow, is laying off 20% of staff as it seeks to streamline its operations amid a cash crunch. The cuts affect 170 of SellerX’s 800 employees.
The Berlin-based company, which has secured nearly $900m since launching in 2020, was put up for auction in September last year by BlackRock, one of its debt investors. BlackRock had placed SellerX into non-accrual status, meaning it had defaulted on its payments.
The sale was halted after SellerX reached an agreement with its lenders and shareholders to reduce the leverage on its balance sheet.
Along with the cuts to jobs announced today, SellerX said in a statement that its new strategy involves focusing on “high potential categories,” such as art supplies and beauty products.
The announcement was made by SellerX’s new CEO Olivier Van Calster — the company’s founders Philipp Triebel and Malte Horeyseck, stepped down as co-CEOs in June 2024, a few months before the company was put up for auction.
Founded in 2020, SellerX secured nearly $900m in debt and equity, from investors including Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, L Catterton and early-stage VC Cherry Ventures, alongside BlackRock.
It was part of a wider cohort of aggregators that popped up in 2021, surfing the pandemic-fuelled e-commerce hype by buying up small online sellers and, as the name suggests, aggregating and scaling them up.
Investors tripped over themselves to get into these businesses: exemplified on September 1 2021, when $1bn was piled into the industry in a single day.
But the e-commerce surge seen during the pandemic didn’t last and — coupled with a drop in consumer spending power — aggregators started to struggle.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/sellerx-amazon-aggregator-layoffs-news/
