Australian social media company Linktree sheds $50m in a year

An Australian unicorn company once lauded as the next big thing has shed $50 million in the space of a year as tech companies go into meltdown.

An Australian unicorn tech company once lauded as the next big thing has shed an eye-watering $50 million in the space of a year.

Linktree – which allows people to link their different social media handles and their personal brand in one website – lost $49.2 million in the financial year period ending last June.

The staggering figure was quietly slipped into a report the billion-dollar company lodged with the corporate regulator, ASIC, in December, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

The firm was struggling last year, following the news in August that it was laying off 17 per cent of staff from its global operations due to tough market conditions and expanding too rapidly.

It comes as the entire tech industry is in a “meltdown” amid a looming recession.

Linktree co-founders Alex Zaccaria, Anthony Zaccaria and Nick Humphreys. Picture: Supplied

According to the filing, Linktree generated $25 million in revenue in 2022.

That’s up from the previous year, where they made $13 million in revenue.

But at the same time they racked up losses totalling $49.2 million.

The staggering loss was attributed to company spending, which far outweighed previous years. By comparison – in 2021, Linktree only lost $3 million in revenue.

They claim the number of people using their website grew by 76 per cent.

The news comes despite the company, that has been backed by billionaire Afterpay co-founder Nick Molnar, raising $US110 million ($A1578 million) in March 2022.

Linktree was recently valued at $1.78 billion and says it has 25 million users and is among the world’s top 300 most popular websites globally with 1.2 billion monthly views.

Brothers Alex and Anthony Zaccaria launched Linktree in 2016 and a third co-founder, Nick Humphreys, also came on board.

The firm reportedly has around 250 employees globally – after around 50 of them were sacked in the lay-offs.

In a statement to news.com.au, a Linktree spokesperson attributed the losses to the fact the company was in “a stage of hyper growth”.

Most of the money was spent on expanding into other world markets and marketing strategies to grow the ground.

“Our continued growth and focus on capital efficiency give us a clear path to profitability,” the spokesperson added.

This photo of office chairs being sold has been labelled as evidence of the tech meltdown by an entrepreneur.

The current market conditions have seen many tech companies, big and small alike, cut jobs or go under as they struggle to stay afloat in the turbulent market.

A month ago, an Australian entrepreneur pointed out a tragic photograph of an office chair graveyard in signs of mass lay-offs across the tech sector.

In November, delivery giant Deliveroo’s Australian branch went into administration as the firm failed to turn a profit. Also in November, cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy.

Then there was Metigy, an artificial intelligence platform, which made headlines for owing an eye-watering $32 million to investors due to its collapse.

A Melbourne-based e-sports company called Order, which raised $5.3 million in funding last year, also collapsed with liquidators seeking to sell the business urgently.

In July, Australia’s first ever neobank founded in 2017, Volt Bank, went under with 140 staff losing their jobs, while 6000 customers were told to urgently withdraw their funds.

Other failed businesses include grocery delivery service Send, which went into liquidation at the end of May – after the company spent $11 million in eight months to stay afloat, and a Victorian food delivery company called Delivr that styled itself as a rival to UberEats also collapsed in July as it became unprofitable.

Many Australian tech firms have also slashed their workforces in the hopes of saving money.

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.