Reports: amid the pandemic, TripActions, Zeus Living, and Sonder have laid off one third or more of their staff; TripActions and Sonder are each valued at $1B+
Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News :
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands at the sharp end of a boom-bust arc: travel-focused startups had just raised a record $7.9B+ in 2019, buoyed by booking platforms and lodging brands — the two categories COVID-19 hit first and hardest. TripActions, Sonder, and Zeus Living were unicorn-era bets on exactly that demand, each now valued at $1B+ or recently so.
The cuts are not uniform in aftermath. Zeus's distress showed up months later as a $15M raise from existing investors at roughly half its December valuation, while TripActions — despite firing ~100 staff en masse on a Zoom call — went on to raise a $155M Series E co-led by a16z and eventually file confidentially for an IPO seeking a $12B valuation.
First-order effects
- TripActions, Zeus Living, and Sonder each cut a third or more of staff within weeks of pandemic lockdowns freezing corporate travel and short-term lodging demand.
- At TripActions, roughly 100 employees were dismissed in a single unannounced Zoom call, a mass-termination style that drew immediate scrutiny from former staff.
Second-order effects
- Zeus Living's follow-on round halved its valuation to ~$110M and came entirely from existing investors, signaling that new capital had retreated from corporate-housing bets while insiders protected their positions.
- TripActions' survival-and-recovery path — Series E in January 2021, then an IPO filing — set the template its unicorn peers had to match or exit against.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, pandemic-era travel startups split into two classes: those that cut deep enough to reach the 2021 recovery with their category intact, and those re-rated downward by down rounds — with headcount cuts of a third becoming the price of admission to the next funding cycle.
- The episode marks the end of the 2019 peak-valuation logic for travel unicorns: $1B+ marks set on pre-COVID booking volumes no longer anchored later rounds, pushing the sector toward profitability-or-consolidation discipline.
The trend: The pandemic forced a headcount and valuation reset across travel startups funded at the 2019 peak, separating survivors that re-raised at higher marks from those marked down by insider-only rounds.