by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Thousands of workers laid off. $2.2 billion up in smoke. 2nd SoftBank unicorn to collapse this year before getting to the IPO or SPAC window, after Greensill, which it helped take down.
“Incremental progress isn’t enough – we are pursuing transformational change on a massive scale,” says the LinkedIn profile of Katerra, a six-year-old Silicon Valley unicorn startup. “Katerra exists to help transform construction through technology – every process and every product,” it says. It had received about $2.2 billion in funding, largely from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, to disrupt the commercial construction industry “through technology,” as it says.
But it’s shutting down and will lay off the remaining employees – it once had as many as 8,500 employees before the layoffs started – and abandon numerous construction projects that it had agreed to build, according to sources cited by The Information.