Checkout.com is facing its second round of executive departures this year and laying off around 80 employees, after making a series of “layoffs by stealth” earlier in 2023.
In the last month, four senior executives at the payments unicorn have left the company, according to people familiar with the moves. Two of these executives were members of the C-suite. So far, just one of the four executives departing has been replaced.
The staff departures come almost two years after Checkout.com raised one of the biggest funding rounds ever in Europe: a $1bn round in January 2022 from a long list of international investors, including Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Coatue and the Qatar Investment Authority.
A second round of exec departures
The departures of two members of Checkout.com’s C-suite — group chief technology officer (CTO) Ott Kaukver and group chief people officer (CPO) Kerry Van Voris — were announced to employees last month.
The company confirmed their departure to Sifted. Kaukver has held the CTO position for three years and will step down at the end of 2023. Van Voris will also leave the company at the end of the year, after almost two and a half years in the role. Checkout.com says a search is underway for her replacement, while Kaukver will be replaced by Mariano Albera, who has been the company’s senior vice president of engineering for the last three years.
“These changes have been made to best position the business for the next stage of its growth and we would like to thank them for their contributions,” a spokesperson for Checkout.com tells Sifted.
Two other executives who oversaw Checkout.com’s compliance functions are also leaving the business.
Mike Weigand, who led the fintech’s compliance department as head of risk, compliance and internal audit, as well as holding a board director seat, stepped down from the position last month. He’d joined Checkout 18 months prior from US investment management giant T Rowe Price, where he’d overlapped with Checkout’s COO Céline Dufétel.
Da-wai Hu, Checkout’s head of legal and general counsel, also left the company last week, Checkout.com confirms. Sifted understands that the company will announce a replacement in due course.
Six executives who directly reported to Checkout.com’s CEO, Guillaume Pousaz, also left the company in the nine months to April 2023. Dozens of other senior employees, including multiple legal, risk and compliance directors, as well as product directors, have left the company in the last 18 months, Sifted previously reported.
Further layoffs and two office closures
At the beginning of December, Checkout.com laid off around 80 people from the engineering, product and HR teams.
It is also closing down its Berlin and Porto offices, the company confirms to Sifted.
“The team changes we are making are deliberate and are designed to accelerate our growth, refocus on our London HQ and not on cutting costs,” a spokesperson for Checkout.com says of the headcount reduction, adding that the company is expecting to increase its headcount by 10% in 2024.
“We are incredibly thankful to those departing the business and are doing our best to support them in their future endeavors,” the spokesperson says.
The spokesperson says the company’s current headcount stands at 1,800 and the fintech plans to increase its headcount by another 10% (around 200 people) next year. Before the September 2022 layoffs, Checkout.com’s headcount was just over 2,000.
The payments unicorn has made two cuts to its internal valuation in the last 12 months, as growth-stage fintechs across Europe struggle to live up to the price tags they were assigned in the 2021-22 bull market.
Sifted revealed in June that Checkout.com had cut the internal tax value of its shares another 15% — that implied a new internal valuation of around $9bn, around a 78% drop from the $40bn price tag it was assigned by investors like Tiger Global in January 2022 in its $1bn Series D.
After Klarna publicly cut its valuation by around 85% to $6.7bn from $45bn in the summer of 2022, Checkout.com’s investor-assigned valuation of $40bn made it Europe’s most valuable private tech company by paper worth.
