Indian Startups Fired 12,000 Employees In Last 180 Days; 60,000 More Jobs Can Be Lost In 2022

This year, over 12,000 workers in the Indian startup ecosystem and more than 22,000 employees in the sector have lost their jobs following an economic meltdown.

Startups Affected By Economic Meltdown

These changes have mostly affected startups, especially those that benefited from a pandemic boom.

As they are feeling the pressure as valuations have started to dip, as sources said. 

It appears that raising new funds has become much more difficult in this gloomy environment, according to the companies.

Further, the startups in India keep sacking their employees to navigate through the “funding winter”.

Led by edtech and e-commerce platforms, the country is expected to witness more than 60,000 job losses in 2022 alone.

Unicorns And Startups Sacking Employees

So far, almost 12,000 startup employees have been fired in the country which includes unicorns such as Ola, Unacademy, Vedantu, Cars24 and Mobile Premier League (MPL), and others like Blinkit, BYJU’s (White Hat Jr, Toppr), Lido Learning, Mfine, Trell, farEye, and Furlanco.

Not only that, across the globe the companies like Netflix, financial services company Robinhood and several crypto platforms have cut down their workforce.

Coming to the world of crypto, it has been battered by the economic headwinds.

The crypto exchanges and firms including Coinbase, Gemini, crypto.com, Vauld, Bybit, Bitpanda and others also announced their plans to downsize the workforce.

Joining the league, Elon Musk-run Tesla has cut 10 percent of its salaried workforce.

At the same time, the Pokemon GO game developer Niantic asked 8 percent which accounts for 85-90 staff of its employees to leave the company.

Industry experts say that at least 50,000 more startup employees are likely to be sacked this year.

All this is happening in the name of “restructuring and cost management” while certain startups keep receiving millions in fundings.

In another development, the TeamLease Employment Outlook Report for the period of July to September 2022 reflects hiring sentiment across 14 cities and 23 sectors in India. 

For this period, 61% of Indian companies are eager to hire new employees. 

Further, the overall intent to hire witnesses a 7% increase from 54% to 61% from the last quarter, as per the report.