A new round of layoffs has hit Seattle laser engraver maker Glowforge.
Co-founder and CEO Dan Shapiro told GeekWire that the startup merged its sales and marketing teams.
“As part of that process, over the last three weeks we added three folks and sadly said goodbye to five folks from that team,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro did not provide details on which positions were impacted, but posts on LinkedIn from affected employees show that at least one longtime marketing leader at the company was let go.
Senior executives and members of the company’s customer care team were also laid off, according to a person with knowledge of the cuts.
In April, Shapiro said that Glowforge employed just over 90 full-time and contract employees.
Shapiro founded Glowforge in 2015 with fellow startup veterans Mark Gosselin, the current CTO, and Tony Wright, who left the company in 2017. Shapiro previously sold the startup Sparkbuy to Google, and he created Robot Turtles, a coding board game for kids that was one of the most successful campaigns ever on Kickstarter.
Glowforge, which has raised $183 million to date and is No. 125 on the GeekWire 200 startup index, went through a rough patch in 2023 and 2024, laying off employees after a funding round fell through.
The company gave up on existing headquarters space in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood to consolidate steps away in a warehouse building on Occidental Avenue South.
In that space, the company recently moved production of its highest-end machines from Mexico back to the United States and was employing 15 production workers to assemble them.
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