Exclusive: Prosus-Backed Airmeet Undertakes Another Restructuring Exercise, Fires 80% Tech Team

Conducting its third restructuring exercise in about 16 months, virtual event startup Airmeet laid off around 80% of its tech team last month, sources told Inc42.

The Prosus-backed startup also fired some employees from its product and design teams as part of the restructuring exercise. Overall, around 30 employees, or 20% of Airmeet’s workforce, were laid off, the sources added.

The layoffs were a part of a cost-cutting exercise as the startup has continued to struggle to increase its revenue in the post-pandemic world, one of the sources said, adding that the number of employees impacted by the latest restructuring could be higher.

Airmeet cofounder and CTO Vinay Kumar Jasti held one-on-one conversations with the impacted employees to inform them about the layoffs. 

The impacted employees will receive a severance package based on their notice periods.

Confirming the layoffs, Airmeet cofounder and CEO Lalit Mangal told Inc42, “We have right sized the team to focus on investing in better and more AI-powered features.” 

Airmeet’s Post-Pandemic Struggles

Founded in 2019 by ​​Mangal, Jasti, and Manoj Kumar Singh, Airmeet is an online meeting and event hosting platform. It also allows participants to connect with other attendees for one-to-one and one-to-many online interactions. 

The startup saw a surge in demand during the Covid-19 pandemic amid the stay-at-home mandates. This also resulted in a lot of investor interest in the startup. However, as the world opened up after the pandemic and virtual events started seeing a sharp decline, Airmeet struggled to increase its revenue. 

Now, the startup seems to have decided to focus on new products. “We are already working on our second product which will be launched soon. Our outlook is to build an R&D function which is largely in-person, based in Bengaluru and wired with the latest AI-powered tools,” Mangal said.

While he didn’t give details about the new product, the CEO said that it will not be focussed on the events space.

This is in line with what the aforementioned sources told Inc42. They said that the startup has decided not to upgrade the existing event management product, which led to the decision to let the entire engineering team go. 

The fresh round of layoffs came almost five months after Inc42 reported that the startup laid off around 20% of its workforce to cut costs.

Prior to that, the startup fired around 30% of its 250-300 people workforce, or at least 75 employees, in May 2023.

Overall, Airmeet has sacked over 100 employees in the last 16 months. 

Airmeet has raised a total funding of about $50 Mn till date and counts the likes of Accel, Peak XV Partners, Sistema Asia Fund, DG Daiwa Ventures, and Nexxus Global among its backers.

On its website, the startup claims to have worked with over 4,000 organisations, including Ford, Unilever, PwC, Capgemini, among others.

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