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Udaan lays off 180-200 employees or 5% of its workforce in ‘efficiency enhancement exercise’

The B2B ecommerce startup was the fastest company to achieve unicorn status as of 2019. The layoffs at Udaan comes just a few days after social commerce startup Citymall announced that it has fired 191 employees to align its “evolving business model and the current business environment”, despite raising $75 million in March this year.

ET Now Digital

Updated Jun 28, 2022, 07:43 IST

Udaan lays off 180-200 employees or 5 of its workforce in ‘efficiency enhancement exercise’

New Delhi: Calling it an “efficiency enhancement exercise”, business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce startup Udaan has said goodbye to 5 per cent of its staff or 180-200 employees. The company, in a town hall with the staff organised on Monday, termed the lay off as “unusual”.

"As the market evolves, we continue to tweak our already proven business model to make it stronger, more efficient, customer-centric and agile. In this direction, we have taken various steps to enhance efficiency, refine our cost structure and grow faster in our journey to achieve strong unit economics," the company said in a statement.

It added that the “efficiency enhancement exercise” has resulted in certain redundancies, with some roles no longer required. A company spokesperson also confirmed the development to Economic Times without disclosing the number of employees fired.

Udaan was the fastest company to achieve unicorn status as of 2019.

Recently, CEO Vaibhav Gupta had told his staff, in an internal note, that the company had hit a positive contribution margin in the last quarter of fiscal 2021 and was on track to become unit economics positive in the ongoing quarter ending June 30.

Gupta, who became the CEO last year, had recently said Udaan is aiming to go public by May 2023.

"Cutting people cost is also part of the journey to be more prudent economically," a person aware of the matter said.

The mass layoffs come after the startup recently closed a $225 million debt financing round through convertible notes with Microsoft being one of the investors.

Udaan layoffs comes just a few days after social commerce startup Citymall announced that it has fired 191 employees to align its “evolving business model and the current business environment”, despite raising $75 million in March this year.

Meanwhile, a number of startups including Unacademy, CityMall, Vedantu, Cars24 and others have fired more than 4,000 employees in total over the past few months.

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