Udaan fires 5% employees to cut costs

Business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce startup Udaan has laid off 180-200 employees, or 5% of its workforce. The company said that the efficiency enhancement exercise has resulted in certain redundancies, with some roles no longer required.

Cutting people's costs is also part of the journey to be more economically cautious, it added. The company said, “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.”

In an internal note, Chief Executive Vaibhav Gupta noted 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.

Udaan is in the business of selling groceries and other goods to local mom-and-pop stores across the country. The company was the fastest company to achieve unicorn status as of 2019. Recently, 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.