UPDATED 22:38 EDT / MARCH 23 2016

NEWS

Smartwatch maker Pebble laying off 25% of staff due to VC fundraising shortage

Smartwatch maker Pebble Technology Corp. is laying off 25 percent of its workforce in an attempt to control how much money it spends, according to a report Wednesday.

In an interview with Tech Insider, Pebble Chief Executive Officer Eric Migicovsky said that the company was laying 40 employees off due to a lack of funds, specifically saying “money is pretty tight these days.”

Migicovsky did note, though, that the company had still raised money even in a difficult environment, having raised $26 million in 2015, not including a successful $20 million raised in a Kickstarter campaign.

In addition, Migicovsky said that Pebble is now focusing on the health and fitness aspects of the company’s wearables, which is what most users are interested in, and that they will start selling their products in India next month through Amazon.

Wise planning

Migicovsky blames the market for the decision to cut the company’s headcount, stating that a “chilly fundraising environment in Silicon Valley [is responsible] for the layoffs,” but the decision to cut staff may not necessarily be a sign of trouble at Pebble, rather it’s wise planning going forward.

“We want to be careful … Pebble is in this for the long haul. We have a vision where wearables will take us in five to 10 years, and this is setting us up for success,” Migicovsky noted, and you can’t help but note that what we have here is a man with a plan.

The wearables market has certainly changed since Pebble debuted the original Pebble back in 2012, however, the company has continued to innovate, most recently with the Time Round, a smartwatch that we described in September 2015 as the best looking, thinnest and lightest smartwatch on the market.

While the norm in Silicon Valley is to constantly rely on further injections of venture capital, given the peak of the second great tech bubble has passed, startups need to actually do something many may even struggle with the concept of, and that’s making themselves profitable.

Given Pebble is still a private company we don’t have any financial figures on them, but the fact that Migicovsky notes both the difficulty of raising funds and the need for plan out for five to 10 years, the only way they could be doing this is to put themselves in a position of profitability, or if not immediately in the mid-term while slowing the flow of their existing funding out the door by way of losses.

If they are setting themselves up to be profitable and to rely less, or not at all, on future fundraising, Kickstarter campaigns aside (which are moreso investments in product development and shipping devices), Migicovsky deserves credit in making the hard decisions now, before they get into a position where they are truly in trouble and potentially run out of money.

Image credit: birme/Flickr/CC by 2.0

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