Cargomatic Slashes Workforce
The Venice, California-based company is among the standard bearers for the so-called “Uber for trucking” movement, a recent wave of startups offering freight services often compared with the popular ridesharing app.
“Key to growing a successful company is knowing where to staff appropriately at different growth phases,” Cargomatic co-founder and CEO Jonathan Kessler said in an e-mail statement. “Sometimes that means making difficult decisions, and to that end, we recently reduced the size of our marketplace operations and inside sales teams.”
Cargomatic would not reveal the size of the reduction, but Business Insider, citing an unidentified former employee, reported that the company laid off 50 to 60 people, or about 50% of its workforce.
Multiple anonymous reviews on Glassdoor.com, a jobs and recruiting site, also claim that Cargomatic cut half of its staff in the recent layoffs.
Kessler said the reduction has allowed the company to make new investments in building out its enterprise sales department by hiring two senior logistics sales executives and its engineering team to automate tasks that previously had been handled manually.
The company recently appointed Chuck Oeleis executive vice president of sales and Meaghan Diem vice president of enterprise sales.
Kessler also said the Cargomatic marketplace continues to expand and has achieved year-over-year growth since the company’s founding in 2013.
“Cargomatic remains laser-focused on developing world-class technology that provides increased efficiency, transparency and affordability to the trucking industry,” he said.
In December, the company expanded its service to the San Francisco Bay area. The company also offers its platform in the Southern California and New York City markets.
In January 2015, the company announced that it received $8 million in additional funding from several investors. At the time, Cargomatic said it planned to use those funds to improve its technology platform and expand beyond the 25 employees it had.
