Goodlord built a platform to manage transactions and the information normally associated with renting a home. The London-based ‘proptech’ startup has laid off nearly 40 employees – co-founder and CEO Richard White will soon be leaving the company, as well.
The job losses, said to be mostly in sales and marketing, come just nine months after Goodlord announced the funding of £7.2 million by Rocket Internet’s GFC. Ribbit Capital and LocalGlobe were also part of the Series A round.
It’s not clear if a new CEO is lined up with the departure of Richard White. And it’s also unclear if Goodlord’s CTO Andrew Done remains employed at the startup, but it’s possible he has left as well.
With so many of the sales and marketing employees being laid off, Goodlord has issued the following statement:
“We have had great success during 2017 bringing new lettings agents onto the platform, however, to focus on scaling effectively and efficiently we have reduced the size of our sales and marketing team and are putting more focus on bringing out new features and automation functionality to the platform. Our customers will see the effects of this focus almost immediately with new features and services being released as soon as the end of the month.
To reflect the increased emphasis on product and technology we restructured the business and following a consultation period we reduced the number of employees from 134 to 96. All affected employees have benefited from an extended paid notice period and have been offered as much support as possible to help them find their next big thing. To ensure we offer the very best platform we can, we have a number of positions open for extremely talented product and engineering staff.
We remain focused on building a business with superior technology and outstanding customer service and our letting agent customers will see no change in the levels of service we offer them.”
Goodlord was founded in 2014 and unlike other startups in the market, its software-as-a-service is designed to support all stakeholders, whether they be traditional letting agents, tenants, or landlords. The SaaS enables letting agents digitize the moving-in process. It utilizes e-signatures and gathers rental payments online. Furthermore, the company sells landlord insurance and works on other related products, like tenant passports and rental guarantees.
