ICON has laid off a large number of its staff.
The Texas-based company was one of the leading 3DCP companies and had previously announced a number of projects to “build neighborhoods”.
In a ”Worker Adjustment & Retraining Notification Notices” (WARN) report issued by the Texas Workforce Commission, it states that ICON Technology, Inc. is reducing its workforce by a whopping 114 people on March 8th.
This is quite surprising because ICON was well-regarded in the investment world. According to Crunchbase, the company received at least US$451M in investment over the past few years. Since ICON is a private company, we can’t officially know their valuation. However, there were rumors that they were valued in excess of US$1B and perhaps even as much as US$2B.
With layoffs, it’s likely that hidden valuation has dropped significantly.
While we know there are 114 layoffs, we don’t know what percentage of the company’s staff that represents. However, it is highly unlikely that the company had more than a few hundred staff, so the 114 is very substantial.
A dramatic reduction in force of this magnitude would not be undertaken lightly, and clearly there is a serious financial situation at play. Companies don’t lay off 20-40% of their workers unless they’ve lost contracts or have been unable to generate revenue.
What’s quite surprising is that the company did receive US$451M in investment from six funding rounds starting in 2018. The most recent round was US$185M in February 2022. Could it be that they have burned through the majority of that cash already?
Since 2020, the company has received US$392M in investment. That’s about US$100M per year since then. US$100M, at US$100,000 per employee, would represent about 1000 staff. If staff were paid more and other costs included, then we’d be at 500 or fewer staff. They’d run out of that cash if they received no revenue over that period in that configuration.
But what about revenue generated from projects? Were they not profitable on these projects? Did they expand faster than they should have? We can’t know what has occurred, as ICON is a privately held company.
I reached out to my contact at ICON for more information, but it seems they are no longer employed there, so it may be that people are already leaving the company in advance of the official layoffs.
As of this writing, there are no official announcements from the company.
Via ICON, Texas Workforce Commission, and Crunchbase
