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

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

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

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Interchain Labs will focus on sovereign L1s and institutional demand, abandoning plans for smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday