Sydney technology company Kinde lays off 28.5% of staff as focus moves to product team

This Sydney company has just laid off 28 per cent of staff as market woes continue to bite the start-up sector.

This Sydney company has just laid off 28 per cent of staff as market woes continue to bite the start-up sector. Source: Supplied.

Another Australian start-up has joined the growing list of casualties in the tech sector as it was forced to lay off staff.

On Monday, the CEO of Sydney tech company Kinde revealed to news.com.au that he had to make eight staff redundant.

It represented about 28.5 per cent of the workforce.

There are now only 20 staff left at the software company, which only launched in the last year.

Ross Chaldecott, co-founder and chief executive of Kinde, said the entire office had been upset by the news, which was broken to them at a company wide meeting earlier this month.

“There were a lot of tears shed on every side,” Mr Chaldecott said.

“It’s not something that’s pleasant to do. It was incredibly painful and difficult. It’s never easy.”

A total of eight staff have left the company.

Mr Chaldecott, a former Atlassian employee, alongside his business partners David Berner and Evgeny Komarevtsev, started Kinde at the end of 2021.

The company offers software development services for start-ups in their early stages and secured seed funding of $10.6 million through venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures last January.

Mr Chaldecott said his company was “well capitalised” but that they had taken on too many staff in non-essential areas.

“There isn’t a company out there that isn’t being forced to look really really hard at the fundamentals,” he explained.

“We wanted a laser focused product team, we are a product company first.

“This was not in any way performance related.’

Accordingly, most of the roles that have been cut have been from the marketing team or human resources and people relations.

All the staff that got the chop had worked at Kinde for less than year, which means under the law, the firm is not lot obligated to give them a severance package.

However, Mr Chaldecott said they wanted to make it as easy as possible on the sacked staff, so they still gave them a redundancy payout and accelerated investing their equity in the company.

Sacked staff are also allowed to keep their work laptop and use it as their own.

He insisted that the so-called “tech wreck” wreaking havoc in the tech sector is not to blame for the lay-offs.

“I wouldn’t say the market conditions have had an impact,” he added.

The Kinde executive team when it launched. Source: Supplied.

Last week, grocery delivery start-up Milkrun laid off 20 per cent of its workforce and shut down its delivery hubs.

Earlier this month, comparison website Finder.com.au laid off or restructured 15 per cent of its workforce.

An Australian social media start-up called Linktree that was recently valued at $1.78 billion sacked 17 per cent of staff from its global operations.

Then there was Australian healthcare start-up Eucalyptus that provides treatments for obesity, acne and erectile dysfunction, which fired up to 20 per cent of staff after an investment firm pulled its funding at the last minute.

Cryptocurrency exchange Swyftx sacked one in five of its staff in August while a Brisbane-based business a telecommunications and IT infrastructure company called Megaport revealed that a whopping $1.6 million was spent paying out the 10 per cent of employees who had been made redundant.

Debt collection start-up Indebted let go of 40 of its employees just before the end of the financial year, despite its valuation soaring to more than $200 million, with most of the redundancies made across sales and marketing.

Originally published as Sydney technology company Kinde lays off 28.5% of staff as focus moves to product team