Shopify announced on Thursday that it will lay off 20% of its workers, affecting over 2,000 individuals.
The company also disclosed that it will sell its logistics business to Flexport for around 13% of its stock.
The announcement comes around ten months after Shopify announced a 10% headcount reduction — roughly 1,000 individuals — and continues a trend in which many large digital companies have engaged in many rounds of redundancies in reaction to economic challenges.
Flexport is a ten-year-old goods and logistics platform that has raised over $2 billion in capital from major investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and SoftBank. Last February, Shopify participated in Flexport’s Series E round, and a few months later, Shopify acquired logistics startup Deliverr for more than $2 billion.
“We are heading into a decade of high velocity and massive change,” Shopify CEO, Tobias Lütke said.
“We will require speed, agility, and a great deal of innovation. Technological progress always arcs towards simplicity, and entrepreneurs succeed more when we simplify. But now we are at the dawn of the AI era and the new capabilities that are unlocked by that are unprecedented. Shopify has the privilege of being amongst the companies with the best chances of using AI to help our customers,” he added.
It’s difficult to say how many workers are affected by Shopify’s newest round of layoffs, but the company has more than 11,600 employees, a figure that was only recently updated from 10,000.