Udaan fires 180-200 staff, 5% of its workforce, to cut costs

Enterprise-to-business (B2B) ecommerce startup Udaan has laid off 180-200 employees, or 5% of its workforce, an individual briefed on the matter mentioned. In a city corridor with the employees on Monday, the corporate termed the lay off as “uncommon”.

An organization spokesperson confirmed the event to ET with out disclosing the variety of staff it fired.

“Because the market evolves, we proceed to tweak our already confirmed enterprise mannequin to make it stronger, extra environment friendly, customer-centric and agile. On this route, now we have taken numerous steps to boost effectivity, refine our price construction and develop sooner in our journey to realize sturdy unit economics,” the corporate mentioned in an announcement. The “effectivity enhancement train” has resulted in sure redundancies, with some roles not required, it added.

The layoffs come on the again of chief government
Vaibhav Gupta telling his staff in an internal note that the corporate had hit a optimistic contribution margin within the final quarter of fiscal 2021 and was on observe to turn out to be unit economics optimistic within the ongoing quarter ending June 30. ET reported concerning the growth on June 15.

“Slicing folks price can also be a part of the journey to be extra prudent economically,” an individual conscious of the matter mentioned.

Owing to a broader slowdown in big-ticket funding, numerous startups together with Unacademy, CityMall, Vedantu, Cars24 and others have fired greater than 4,000 staff in whole over the previous few months.

Udaan lately closed a $225 million debt financing spherical via convertible notes and Microsoft is among the traders,
ET
reported on April 18.

In an
interview
with ET in February, Gupta mentioned the DST World-backed startup had made “large enhancements” in its unit economics and that Udaan is aiming to go public by Might 2023.
Gupta was
made CEO last year.

The layoffs at Udaan come at a time when different firms within the area have been elevating funds, together with ElasticRun, ShopKirana, and 1K Kirana.

Based in 2016, Udaan is within the enterprise of promoting groceries and different items to native mom-and-pop shops throughout the nation. Based by former Flipkart executives Sujeet Kumar, Vaibhav Gupta and Amod Malviya, it was the quickest firm to realize unicorn standing as of 2019.

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