Venture capital firm NFX laid off four employees in September as it seeks to “rebalance” resources from its software and product teams to its investment team, general partner Pete Flint told TechCrunch.
Flint said the layoffs included one product leader and three engineers. About a week ago, Amy Lin, who had been chief product officer since 2017, announced on LinkedIn that she was leaving the company.
NFX builds and runs its own in-house software to find and evaluate companies, but Flint said the company recently used AI to achieve the same level of results with fewer people. It turns out that it can be achieved. Flint said the company's product and engineering teams remain large and its investment team has not been affected.
In fact, the company plans to use the resources freed up by the layoffs to expand its investment team. Flint said NFX is looking to hire new talent for its investment teams in both San Francisco and Israel.
NFX also promoted multiple members of its current team. In July, the firm promoted Sarai Bronfeld from principal to partner. Bronfeld has been with NFX since 2021 and is based in Tel Aviv. The company also promoted Daniel Muceres to principal. Mr. Museles joined the firm as an associate in 2022 and is based in San Francisco.
Flint said the company's overall NFX team may be larger than before the rebalance.
“That's the focus of our investment team, and it's working very well,” Flint said. “We're going to continue to develop our software and products. We've had great success. We're going to grow our investment team by 20% and that's really the focus for us.”
San Francisco-based NFX was founded in 2017 and invests in pre-seed and seed-stage companies across categories including biotech, gaming, generative AI, and fintech. The firm was one of the first VCs to approach venture investing with a software and data-driven strategy. NFX has raised nearly $1 billion across three early-stage funds, in addition to one opportunity fund. We have backed numerous startups that have become unicorns or gone public, including Lyft, Mammoth Biosciences, and Doordash.
NFX is not the only venture company to restructure resources and lay off staff. Just last week, Initialized Capital announced it was cutting several partners and investment support staff. TechCrunch estimates that Initialized has reduced its workforce by 36%. Greylock fired five investors last fall. Sequoia Capital will cut one-third of its platform team in 2023.