Bubble Has Burst? 10,000+ Employees Fired By Indian Startups | These Job Profiles Severely Impacted

The Indian startups are struggling to raise funds and are finding ways to reduce their cash burn to survive the funding winter but the heat is already taken by the 10000 employees caught up in this fire. 

Layoffs In Startups

During 2022, more than 10,500 Indian employees working at startups were let go, as per the data.

Interestingly, this is happening after a year of aggressive hiring by startups. 

In 2021, the high employee costs as tech salaries skyrocketed. 

This started the tech hiring and talent war in a year witnessing immense investor interest and multiple rounds of fundraises by these companies.

It is noteworthy here that these layoffs are mostly affecting the  sales and marketing roles, as per the data from various industry sources.

At the same time, the engineering and product roles have been mostly insulated from the heat.

CityMall Layoffs

The latest entry in the list is the Gurugram-headquartered social commerce startup CityMall. 

The startup said that it has laid off 191 employees citing restructuring of roles to align to a change in its business model and current funding environment as reasons in a LinkedIn post on Jun 19, 2022.

Prior to this, the three-year old startup had raised $75 million during March.

The firm is backed by investors including Accel, Norwest Venture Partners, Elevation Capital, and General Catalyst.

Not The First One

Notably, CityMall is not the only one who is downsizing its staff in 2022.

 So far, over 25 startups have laid off employees in large numbers citing funding crunch, restructuring, and so on since the beginning of the year. 

Some have gone ahead and put the blame on employees’ performance calling the layoffs standard.

The startups list includes names like Meesho, Cars24, Ola, and Blinkit, who have fired their employees in masses. 

Edtech Startup Having The Most Burn

Interestingly, the worst-hit during this period is taken by the Indian edtech startups.

With the commencement of the offline tuition centers, schools, and colleges, the demand for remote learning and technology-based education services is dropping.

It appears that the slowing demand coupled with the much-talked-about funding winter has had a domino effect on India’s thriving edtech companies.

This list includes Unacademy, Vedantu, Lido Learning, and so on, forcing them to lay off as many as 4,000 employees, making almost 38 percent of the total layoffs.

For instance, SoftBank-backed Unacademy laid off another 150 employees on June 18, after letting go of around 600 employees or 10 percent of its workforce earlier this year.

Presently, the layoff story has taken center stage after a boom year in which job seekers received multiple offers and were hired for sky-high salaries with even BMW cars offered as incentives in some cases.