Over 12,000 startup staff lose jobs so far this year

As the startup sector gets hammered by economic meltdown, more than 12,000 workers in the Indian startup ecosystem have lost jobs in 2022 so far.

Startups, especially the ones who benefited from a pandemic boom, are feeling the pressure as valuations, particularly at the late stage, have started to dip, IANS reports, quoting a Crunchbase study.

Startups now say it is much more difficult to raise new funding in this gloomy environment.

As startups in India keep firing their staff to navigate through the ‘funding winter’, the country may see more than 60,000 job losses in 2022 alone, led by edtech and e-commerce platforms.

The downsizing move so far has been led by by companies like Ola, Blinkit, BYJU’s (White Hat Jr, Toppr), Unacademy, Vedantu, Cars24, Mobile Premier League (MPL), Lido Learning, Mfine, Trell, farEye and Furlenco.

Globally, 22,000 workers in the tech and start-up sectors have lost jobs in 2022, led by companies like Netflix, financial services company Robinhood and several crypto platforms.

In the world of crypto that has been battered by the economic headwinds, crypto exchanges and firms, including Coinbase, Gemini, crypto.com, Vauld, Bybit, Bitpanda and others, announced to downsize their workforce.

Pokemon GO game developer Niantic has asked 8% of its workforce to leave the company, which is said to be around 85-90 people.

Elon Musk-run Tesla has cut 10% of its salaried workforce.

Industry experts say that at least 50,000 more startup employees are likely to be thrown out this year alone in the name of “restructuring and cost management” while certain startups keep receiving millions in fundings.

Even several unicorns like Ola, Unacademy, Vedantu, Cars24 and Mobile Premier League (MPL) have also laid off employees.