Singapore marketplace Carousell cut 110 roles, about 10% of its workforce, in December 2022, with co-founder and chief executive Quek Siu Rui saying he was deeply sorry and had been too optimistic about post-pandemic growth. Weeks earlier, the company had disclosed a data breach affecting about 1.95 million accounts in Singapore.
Quek's message to staff was unusually self-critical for a founder. He said the leadership had grown expenses and headcount quickly after Covid lockdowns, expecting returns that took longer to arrive, and had underestimated how larger teams slow decisions and add coordination costs. The group searched its budget line by line, accepted voluntary pay cuts at the top and moved to a cheaper office before concluding that job cuts were unavoidable to reach profitability.
Affected employees were promised compensation of at least three months, calculated at one month per year of service and topped up where necessary, along with extended medical benefits, job-search tools, career counselling and access to an employee assistance programme. Carousell said it worked with the NTUC-affiliated Creative Media and Publishing Union to conduct the exercise under fair retrenchment principles, and that only some business units were affected.
The layoffs would have been a difficult story on their own. The data breach made it a crisis of trust. In October 2022 a vulnerability in the platform was exploited and personal data linked to roughly 1.95 million Singapore accounts — reported as about 39% of its local user base — was compromised and offered for sale online. The Personal Data Protection Commission was notified, and affected users were informed, but the scale underlined how much identity data a classifieds app accumulates through ordinary buying and selling.
Carousell, founded in 2012 by Quek, Marcus Tan and Lucas Ngoo, had grown from a National University of Singapore startup project into a regional recommerce group operating across Southeast Asia and beyond, acquiring businesses including sneaker marketplace Ox Street, fashion reseller Refash and electronics recommerce firm Laku6. Ngoo later stepped back from day-to-day management in 2024 while remaining a co-founder, director and adviser, another sign of a maturing company shedding its founding operating structure.
The combination of breach and retrenchment captured the end of an era for Singapore startups. The pandemic years rewarded platforms that hired ahead of demand; 2022 punished them with rising rates, falling valuations and deferred initial public offerings, including Carousell's own postponed listing ambitions. Quek's insistence that the company had to become master of its destiny by reaching profitability quickly became a slogan repeated, in substance, across the regional tech sector.
Carousell survived, which separates it from many pandemic-era casualties, but the two episodes remain attached to its name. A marketplace sells trust — that a stranger's goods are real and that a user's data is safe. In the space of one quarter, Carousell had to apologise for failing on the second while cutting the people who maintained the first, a juxtaposition no founder's letter, however candid, could fully repair.