Groupon's Project Foundry: The 377 in Chicago Are a Sales Trade, Not an Engineering One
Groupon's Project Foundry cuts up to 400 by Sept 30. The cohort is merchant-acquisition AEs in Chicago, not SWEs. Here's how to source them.
On May 21, 2026, Groupon's board approved Project Foundry: up to 400 cuts out of roughly 1,734 employees, finished by September 30. COO Jiri Ponrt resigned the same day, effective July 10, without severance. If you read the 8-K like a standard AI layoff and start drafting Boolean strings for laid-off SWEs, you will miss the actual cohort. This one is a sales trade.
Why Project Foundry is not a SWE layoff
Most 2025-2026 AI-driven cuts (Microsoft, Cloudflare, Intuit, Salesforce) gutted engineering first. Foundry inverts that. Groupon is explicitly replacing its merchant-outreach sales team with AI voice agents, the same outbound calls that have been the backbone of the local-deals business since 2008. Engineering is being trimmed too, but through codegen and automated QA pipelines rather than mass layoffs. CEO Dusan Senkypl framed it on the May 7 earnings call as embedding AI agents "into the core of every function."
Translation for recruiters: the largest, most reachable cohort is SDRs, AEs, and merchant development managers, not staff engineers. The Boolean strings most sourcers reach for ("software engineer" AND "Groupon") will return the wrong slice.
The Chicago footprint matters here. After Groupon broke its River North lease in January 2024 and subleased a 25,000-square-foot floor at 35 W. Wacker, the local workforce had collapsed to 150 people. By late 2025 it had more than doubled to 377, mostly sales and finance, occupying a second floor. Cutting up to 400 globally means a meaningful share of that very recent Chicago rebuild is about to reverse.
The Neligan playbook, and why it makes this cohort valuable
The person to anchor on is Sarah Neligan. She moved from Ireland to Chicago about 18 months ago to run new business development for the eastern half of the US, and she built the local-market sales playbook Groupon planned to roll out city by city. That playbook, telephonic SMB merchant acquisition tuned for restaurants, salons, spas, and local services, is exactly what the AI voice agents are being trained to replace.
Which means the ~68 Chicago-area reps who learned it in the last 18 months are freshly trained, recently quota-carrying, and immediately re-deployable to anyone selling into the same merchants:
- Yelp (Chicago SMB sales, identical ICP)
- Toast and Square (restaurants and local services)
- ServiceTitan (home services, slightly upmarket)
- Booksy, Mindbody/ClassPass, Tock (beauty, wellness, hospitality)
- Thumbtack, Fiverr Local (services marketplaces)
If you run merchant-acquisition sales at any of those, the next 90 days are the cleanest window you will get all year. The reps are not yet hired, not yet on competitive non-competes, and have a story enterprise SaaS buyers actually want: humans who closed SMB deals against AI competition, not against other humans.
Position them as sellers who can close AI-skeptical merchants, not as displaced workers.
What LinkedIn returns, and what it misses
A title search for Groupon merchant-acquisition profiles (AE, SDR, Merchant Development, Local Sales) returns roughly 68 matches, with "Account Executive" dominant at 22. Greater Chicago Area is the top region by a wide margin. That is a usable starting point, but it has two failure modes.
First, Groupon's sales org uses inconsistent titles. "Inside Sales Representative," "Merchant Development Manager," "New Business Manager," and "Local Account Executive" all describe overlapping roles. A clean Boolean misses anyone who self-described loosely.
Second, the most valuable signal is not the title. It is recency on the Chicago playbook. You want reps who joined or transferred since mid-2024, when Neligan's eastern-US build-out started. Tenure under three years, Chicago metro, ramp completed, quota attained. LinkedIn's filters do not give you that intersection cleanly.
This is the friction Refolk is built for. You describe the cohort in plain English ("Groupon AEs or merchant development reps in Chicago who joined after mid-2024, closed SMB merchants on telephonic outbound") and get a ranked shortlist that pulls from LinkedIn, GitHub where relevant, and the open web, including Built In Chicago profiles and the Groupon Alumni group that title-only Boolean cannot reach.
The COO exit is a signal, not a sideshow
Jiri Ponrt is not a career operator. He is a partner at Pale Fire Capital, the Prague-based fund Senkypl co-founded and Groupon's largest investor. He moved up to COO during the Pale Fire takeover. Resigning effective July 10, voluntarily, without taking the severance benefits he was contractually entitled to, on the same day the board approved Foundry, is not a routine departure.
The most likely read: the AI-native plan came from Senkypl and the board, not the operating side. Which means the VPs of Sales, the regional directors, and the merchant development leads one layer below Ponrt are demoralized and call-receptive before the formal WARN-style notices land. The reachable window for senior sales leadership is now, not September.
For founders building merchant-facing GTM teams, this is a once-a-cycle chance to hire a Chicago-trained sales director who has already run the playbook you are trying to copy. Neligan herself is the obvious name. The next two layers down are less obvious and more available.
The engineering side is smaller, but Prague matters
Foundry's engineering disruption is real but quieter. Groupon is shipping features without traditional engineering teams, leaning on AI-generated code and automated QA. New CTO Ales Drabek, who joined in May 2025 from Lampenwelt (the European lighting e-commerce leader), is overseeing the experiment.
The cohort here splits geographically:
- Chicago engineers: smaller in number, but the ones being displaced have e-commerce and marketplace experience that maps to Tovala, Tempus AI, Cameo, and Tegus/AlphaSense locally.
- Prague engineers: this is where Pale Fire's footprint runs deepest. Displaced Prague engineers tend to return to the Pale Fire portfolio (Alza.cz, ePojisteni) or to the Czech fintech and marketplace cluster. Most US recruiters never surface them because LinkedIn's region filters and English-first searches drop Czech-language profiles.
For Chicago tech talent buyers, the engineering slice is a side dish. The merchant-acquisition reps are the main course.
A 90-day sourcing plan, anchored on September 30
Groupon's fiscal Q3 runs July 1 to September 30. The 8-K language ("up to 400 positions globally by the end of the third quarter 2026, subject to local legal processes") gives you a hard outer bound. The pre-tax restructuring charge of $7 to $13 million, mostly severance, and the $20 to $25 million in annualized savings, tell you these are real exits, not reassignments.
Here is the cadence that works:
June (now through July 10): Reach the senior sales layer before Ponrt's exit lands and reorgs cascade. VPs, regional directors, and Neligan-level playbook owners. Inbound is still warm. Frame conversations around the playbook they built, not the job they are losing.
July to mid-August: Reach the AE and merchant development cohort. WARN-equivalent notices and internal announcements typically land 60 to 90 days before the cut date. Reps who get tapped will spend two to three weeks updating their profiles and reaching out to their networks before they answer cold outreach. Be in the second wave of inbound, not the first (which will be dominated by generic recruiter spam).
Mid-August through September: The reachable pool peaks. This is when Refolk earns its keep, because the cohort is moving fast, profiles are updating daily, and the "joined after January 2024, Chicago metro, SMB outbound" intersection becomes the difference between hiring two reps and hiring twelve.
October onward: Watch for the second wave. The 8-K explicitly preserves optionality for further cuts through end of 2027. Engineering and ops are the likely next targets. Set a standing query and let it re-run.
Don't ignore the alumni surface
Three communities matter more than LinkedIn for this cohort:
- The Groupon Alumni LinkedIn group, which historically activates within weeks of any major cut and is where the Chicago network does its real introductions.
- Built In Chicago profiles, where Groupon AEs maintain richer career histories than they do on LinkedIn.
- Chi Tech Slack and Pale Fire Capital alumni clusters in Prague for the engineering and senior operator slice.
These are the surfaces that turn "I have a list of 68 names" into "I have a warm intro to the 12 who match." Refolk pulls across all three plus the open web, which is why merchant acquisition recruiters working this Foundry window will move faster than ones who stop at LinkedIn.
The bottom line
Project Foundry is mis-categorized in most layoff trackers as another AI-driven SWE cut. It is not. It is the dismantling of a Chicago-built, Ireland-imported, recently doubled merchant-acquisition sales engine, with a parallel engineering trim funded by codegen. The 377 in Chicago, especially the reps trained in the last 18 months on Neligan's playbook, are the asset on the market. Yelp, Toast, ServiceTitan, Square, and the rest of the local-SMB SaaS bench should already be moving. The window closes September 30, and the next wave does not open until well into 2027.
FAQ
How many people are actually being cut, and when?
The May 21, 2026 8-K says up to 400 positions globally, including both employees and contractors, completed by the end of Q3 2026 (September 30). Groupon also flagged "additional material cost-reduction and automation actions" subject to future board approval, expected to wrap by end of 2027. Treat 400 as the floor for this calendar year and assume a phased second wave in 2027.
Are Groupon engineers worth sourcing under Project Foundry?
Some, but they are the secondary cohort. The Chicago engineering slice is small and skews e-commerce/marketplace, with natural landing spots at Tovala, Tempus AI, and Tegus/AlphaSense. The Prague engineering pool is larger and harder to reach through LinkedIn alone. The merchant-acquisition sales cohort is bigger, more concentrated, more recently trained, and easier to source. Start there.
Why is COO Jiri Ponrt's resignation relevant to sourcers?
Ponrt is a Pale Fire Capital partner who walked away from his contractual severance the same day the board approved the layoffs. That signals the AI-native plan came from CEO Senkypl and the board, not from operations. The senior sales leadership reporting into Ponrt is likely demoralized and reachable now, weeks before formal cut notices, which makes June and early July the best window for VP and director-level outreach.
What's the cleanest first query to run on this cohort?
Something like: "Groupon account executives, SDRs, and merchant development reps in Greater Chicago who joined after January 2024 and sold SMB outbound deals to restaurants, salons, or local services." That intersection (recent hire, Chicago metro, Neligan-era playbook) is what separates re-deployable closers from longer-tenured reps who may have already churned. It is also the query type Refolk handles natively without forcing you to translate into Boolean.