Crunchyroll parent company Ellation lays off 17 employees

It's never good news to hear about lay-offs, and as anime fans it's particular painful to hear that some long-standing employees at streaming service Crunchyroll have lost their jobs.

The news broke courtesy of the Anime Herald web site, who received confirmation from CEO of Crunchyroll's parent company, Ellation, that a total of 17 employees had been laid off.

We recently closed an acquisition to significantly expand the size of our engineering team. As part of company restructuring efforts, it is with regret that we needed to make some difficult but necessary changes at Ellation. This morning, we parted ways with 17 employees that played important roles in helping us grow the company over the last several years.

This was not an easy decision, but one that puts Ellation on the path towards continued growth. While this announcement is unfortunate, it is not a reflection of Ellation’s overall business. It was a record-year for Crunchyroll in 2016 and VRV is off to a great start. We have some exciting plans for 2017 that we’ll be sharing soon.

Unconfirmed sources suggest that these job losses come after Ellation acquired a portion of software development company Yopeso, which led to lay-offs across Crunchyroll's San Francisco engineering team and software QA staff as those roles were effectively replaced with Yopeso employees.

Our thoughts go out to those affected, and we hope they find new employment in short order.