LeddarTech refocuses its activities and reduces its workforce

Nine months after closing its biggest round of funding, Quebec start-up LeddarTech is cutting its workforce by about 11% after adjusting its business model to focus on automotive software rather than components.

Julien Arsenault
The Press

The Quebec-based company specializing in automotive detection technologies laid off 27 workers last month, according to the layoff notice that was sent to the Quebec government.

“We are still growing in software while on the production side [de composants], it’s down, says LeddarTech President and COO Frantz Saintellemy. It’s a change in the business model. »

At the end of this restructuring, the workforce of LeddarTech is approximately 220 people. The company has developed a wide range of applications to guide autonomous vehicles.

At the start of the year, it unveiled a promising system for simulating automotive sensors designed with the German firm dSpace. The objective is to significantly reduce the training time of artificial intelligences.

Despite the downsizing, LeddarTech remains in good shape, says Saintellemy. Positions are to be filled in the most promising sectors of the company, he says. The positions eliminated are distributed across the company, which has research centers in Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto and two others abroad.

LeddarTech is considered a unicorn, a name used to describe young shoots valued at more than 1 billion, since the fall of 2020.

As recently as last February, the company closed a C$177 million financing round, the largest in its short history. Investissement Québec – the financial arm of the Québec state – had contributed with an injection of 11.7 million in exchange for preferred shares.

Quebec also loaned 33 million to LeddarTech about two years ago.

Last February, sources told The Press that the round of financing carried out by the company would “ideally” be the last announcement of its kind before an IPO.

In the current economic context, LeddarTech will have to be patient, concedes Mr. Saintellemy.

“Stock markets aren’t the happiest these days,” he says. We want to position ourselves to take advantage of the growth in automotive software. When the context is more favourable, we will assess the capital markets. For the moment, it is not a favorable situation for that. »

In order, the German firm Osram, the French investment fund I-Source and the Business Development Bank of Canada are the three main shareholders of LeddarTech.