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

The Nova Labs departures spanned multiple departments, sources said

article-image

FellowNeko/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share

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

Read more: Inside Helium’s vision for the future

“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. 

Read more: Helium eyes energy sector with new solar power play

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.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

morpho 2 graphic.png

Research

Utilizing a ‘DeFi Mullet’ approach, Coinbase’s Bitcoin-backed loans integration with Morpho demonstrates a powerful blueprint for CEXs to monetize dormant assets by expanding adoption of wrapped products (cbBTC, USDC) while also supporting native and/or preferred DeFi ecosystems (Base) which can further lead to downstream growth in onchain liquidity and increased utilization of the related assets.

article-image

The fate of Coinbase has been intertwined with Bitcoin long before the company went public in 2021

article-image

Forward Guidance’s Felix Jauvin noted that he’s bullish on both crypto and bitcoin on a “mean reversion basis”

article-image

This is the largest equity investment that Framework Ventures has ever made,” Framework’s Michael Anderson exclusively told Blockworks

article-image

The stickiness could be the result of bear market conditions where users are swapping out of riskier tokens to hold stablecoins on Solana apps instead, a Blockworks Research analyst said

article-image

The dollar index is down 3.7% today from Wednesday, and consumer sentiment fell to lower than expected

article-image

Ethereum core developers finalize Pectra’s May 7 launch and wrap scoping of the next upgrade