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

Business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce startup Udaan has laid off 180-200 employees, or 5% of its workforce, a person briefed on the matter said. In a town hall with the staff on Monday, the company termed the lay off as “unusual”.

A company spokesperson confirmed the development to ET without disclosing the number of employees it fired.

“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. The “efficiency enhancement exercise” has resulted in certain redundancies, with some roles no longer required, it added.

The layoffs come on the back of chief executive
Vaibhav Gupta telling 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. ET reported about the development on June 15.

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

Owing to a broader slowdown in big-ticket funding, 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.

Udaan recently closed a $225 million debt financing round through convertible notes and Microsoft is one of the investors,
ET
reported on April 18.

In an
interview
with ET in February, Gupta said the DST Global-backed startup had made “massive improvements” in its unit economics and that Udaan is aiming to go public by May 2023.
Gupta was
made CEO last year.

The layoffs at Udaan come at a time when other companies in the space have been raising funds, including ElasticRun, ShopKirana, and 1K Kirana.

Founded in 2016, Udaan is in the business of selling groceries and other goods to local mom-and-pop stores across the country. Founded by former Flipkart executives Sujeet Kumar, Vaibhav Gupta and Amod Malviya, it was the fastest company to achieve unicorn status as of 2019.

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