Helium Mobile’s parent company cut nearly 40% of staff in August

Nova Labs, the company behind the Helium Mobile cell network, undertook a significant round of layoffs at the end of August, three people with knowledge of the matter told Blockworks.

Nova Labs Chief Operating Officer Frank Mong confirmed to Blockworks that 36% of the company was let go. 

One person familiar with the situation cast the layoffs as right-sizing the company to focus on Nova Labs’ core cellular business. A former employee estimated Nova Labs had around 105 employees at the time of the layoffs. 

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“We experienced tremendous growth in our mobile network business. We saw an opportunity to focus more attention and resources on accelerating the growth of the network and subscriber base, resulting in the need to be more efficient across the board. We appreciate the efforts of all our current and former employees,” Mong said in an email.

Former employees said the layoffs spanned multiple departments within Nova Labs, including its engineering team.

Helium began as a startup focused on the internet of things (IoT), which is a nebulous term for physical objects with the capacity to connect and exchange data with other devices. 

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Over time, Helium became one of crypto’s buzziest businesses, using tokens to incentivize users to build distributed wireless networks. People or businesses can use Helium-approved hardware to generate a wireless signal and receive tokens as a reward. The “people’s network” raised over $360 million in venture capital funding between 2013 and 2022, according to funding tracking site CryptoRank. 

The Helium Foundation today maintains the Helium IoT network, and Helium co-founder Amir Haleem has taken the helm at Nova Labs, which was spun out from the original project. 

One source said the Nova Labs layoffs were partly a result of a strategic pivot from the project, which started out building wireless networks but has now coalesced at Nova Labs around a core business of crypto-forward cell phone plans. 

Helium Mobile sells nationwide unlimited cell plans for $20 a month. The plan is enabled through a partnership with T-Mobile in which Helium Mobile users connect to the Helium network where possible, and Helium Mobile pays for T-Mobile data otherwise.

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