Layoffs at Lime and Getaround herald rise of profit-hungry unicorns

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Positive adjusted EBITDA, or something close to it.

That’s the message from scooter unicorn

Lime

, which announced this week that it was cutting about 14% of its staff

and closing a dozen markets. The staff reductions, numbering about 100

, come as the company has touted efforts to improve its profitability — going as far as setting targets for when it might reach capital freedom, as well as highlighting the matter in a recent corporate blog post.

(

Bird,

a Lime

competitor, also underwent layoffs

this year.)

What’s going on? Unicorns, once hungry for growth, are now hell-bent to show current (and future) investors that their businesses aren’t unprofitable quagmires. Profitability, or movement towards it, is hot, and Lime is a good example of the trend — as is

Getaround

, which also wrote about its own layoffs this week. Let’s dig in.