Delphia, a Toronto-based personal investment and data startup, has laid off roughly a third of its workforce, The Logic has learned.  

The firm, which is developing an investment platform that will solicit financial data from customers to develop market forecasts that guide its investing decisions, eliminated the jobs of 10 employees, including several members of its marketing and development team on February 26, according to five sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter. The Logic agreed not to identify them because of their fear of retribution from the company.

Four former employees told The Logic the company said it was making the cuts to focus on product and sustain cash flow until 2022. The sources also said the company’s leadership is struggling to define a vision and a successful business model for the platform. 

“Product-market fit is hard. We’re close, but we’re not there yet and we thought we would be. That’s really all there is to the story,” said Delphia CEO and co-founder Andrew Peek in an email to The Logic. 

Founded in 2018, Delphia was spun out of data company Vox Pop Labs, and is a graduate of the accelerators Creative Destruction Labs and Y Combinator. It has since raised $14 million in funding, including investment from Real Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Golden Ventures, Black Jays Investments and Day One Ventures. 

In a December 2019 interview with The Globe and Mail, Peek said the company had a goal of signing up 100,000 Americans and Canadians in the coming months. Once it reaches that threshold, Peek said, it would use machine learning to analyze the insights they provide, in tandem with other public data. The more data they provide—including answering daily questions about current events, and providing access to social media and purchasing histories—the greater share of Delphia’s two per cent management fee they would be paid. The company’s goal is to provide retail investors with the kind of data-driven market intelligence that’s usually the purview of deep-pocketed institutional investors and hedge funds. In its own words: “This is the first service that will allow consumers to invest in the stock market using their personal data.”

One former employee told The Logic that Delphia has “a good vision,” but its decisions do not feed into that vision. The employee said the company was spending heavily on branding and videos, as well as a planned company retreat to Mexico this month for a hackathon. 

“I was surprised that I was laid off, to be honest,” the employee said, adding that the moment was marked when Peek sent a company-wide email that began, “It’s with a heavy heart that [we] need to make a series of important changes to the way our team is constructed today.” 

“The message we all received said that the board was thinking about this for some time, and that the company currently doesn’t have enough runway,” said one current employee. “Our CEO is not always aligned with everyone … while the firm’s structure is clean, it gets very confusing directions.”

“The leadership does not have a sense of how to move forward,” said the former employee. “They know where they want to be, but they don’t know what to do today.” 

Another employee still with the firm told The Logic there is some uncertainty among the workforce about what the company’s new business model—based on a future annual subscription fee model—looks like. Others, they said, saw the writing on the wall, and believe Delphia is making the right move.

Update: This story has been updated to include a direct quote from Peek’s company-wide email.

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