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A Google-backed startup that makes personalised children's books has laid off a bunch of staff

Sam Shead   

A Google-backed startup that makes personalised children's books has laid off a bunch of staff

London publishing startup Lost My Name has laid off over 10% of its workforce less than two months after raising a €4 million (£3.3 million) funding round.

The company - founded in 2012 by Asi Sharabi and Tal Oron - creates customised books based around a child's name. The books are customised and ordered online, then sent out to printing partners around the world.

A Business Insider source with knowledge of the company said that around 10 of Lost My Name's 70-strong workforce had been laid off.

Sharabi confirmed via email that he has let go of nine Lost My Name employees.

He provided us with the following statement:

"We wanted to go back to a more of a lean startup mode and to do more with less. The people we let go came from all areas of the business. We looked at our priorities, we looked at what's working (e.g content marketing) and what's not (e.g display marketing) we revised our hiring pipeline, we looked at the people we know will be leaving us in the next few months, we asked ourselves who is ready and capable to take us to the next phase of growth, who isn't, and we amended our plan accordingly. Most of new hiring are product people with couple of specialists marketing peeps."

Lost My Name has raised a total of $13 million (£9 million) from investors. The last funding round of €4 million was described as an extension to the $9 million (£6 million) series A round that Lost My Name raised last June from Google Ventures, Greycroft, and Allen & Co.

Google Ventures partner Avid Larizadeh sits on the Lost My Name board, as does Greycroft partner Dana Settle.

Lost My Name's first product entitled "The Little Boy/Girl Who Lost His/Her Name" was the best selling picture book of 2015 in Spain, Italy, and Australia and the top grossing one in the UK and the US. Their second book, "The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home," is currently only available in the UK and the US but it is due to launch across other European countries later in the year.

Lost My Name announced in December that it had sold over 1 million books. That number now stands at over 1.5 million.

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