Sources: Softbank-backed car-rental startup Getaround plans to lay off ~150 employees, or about a quarter of its staff, to mitigate rising costs
Car-rental startup Getaround plans to lay off roughly 150 employees, or about a quarter of its staff, in a bid to reduce rising costs, people familiar with the matter said.
Context & Ripple Effects
The layoffs land two years after SoftBank put money into Getaround's roughly $100M round, a bet on peer-to-peer car rental scaling fast enough to justify a rising valuation — sources later pegged a Series D extension near $1.7B. Cutting a quarter of staff in January 2020 is the first public sign that the cost base of running a physical car-sharing network was outrunning revenue.
The move also sits inside a broader unwind of SoftBank's mobility bets: Fair.com had already cut 40% of staff months earlier, and within weeks of this report Getaround itself was actively seeking a sale as COVID hit. The endgame came five years on, when it shut down US operations entirely, including HyreCar, to focus on Europe.
First-order effects
- Roughly 150 employees — about a quarter of Getaround's staff — lose their jobs immediately, while the remaining team inherits a leaner operation built around cutting the burn rate rather than growth.
- SoftBank faces another marked-down portfolio company just months after Fair.com's 40% cut, tightening scrutiny across its mobility holdings.
Second-order effects
- Competitors reading the same unit economics keep retreating from owned-fleet models: Uber had already shut its US auto-leasing business over per-vehicle losses, and Lyft would later close its own five-location rental service.
- A quarter-staff cut ahead of a pandemic makes Getaround a distressed asset, pushing it toward the sale process reported weeks later rather than an independent fundraising path.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US peer-to-peer and fleet-based car sharing consolidates around asset-light intermediaries — third-party listings rather than capital-heavy operations — with Europe left as the surviving regional market for pure-play P2P players like Getaround.
- SoftBank's big-check playbook for hardware-and-vehicles marketplaces gives way to correlated de-risking: portfolio companies cut headcount, shed geographies, or sell rather than raise at prior valuations.
The trend: SoftBank-backed shared-mobility marketplaces are systematically shrinking their capital-intensive US operations, with Getaround's layoffs an early step toward its eventual retreat to Europe.