African genomics startup 54gene laid off 95 employees in August 2022, representing approximately 30% of its workforce of over 290. The layoffs primarily resulted from a significant decline in COVID-19 testing demand, a business line the company had expanded into during the pandemic. This downturn led to redundancies across multiple functions, including labs, sales, data entry, and sample collection. Founded in 2019, the startup had raised $45 million to advance precision medicine by building a biobank of African genetic data, but the contraction of its testing operations necessitated this workforce reduction.
