Exclusive: CARS24 To Fire 120 More Employees In Restructuring Exercise

Update | May 27, 11:23 PM IST

In a statement sent to Inc42 after this story was published, a Cars24 spokesperson said, “No layoffs are taking place at present. Our priority remains long-term growth and building with intent.”

Original | May 27, 08:33 PM IST

Over a month after it laid off 200 employees, used car marketplace CARS24 is in the process of laying off another 120 employees from its non-core verticals as part of a restructuring exercise, sources told Inc42.

The Delhi NCR-based startup is either shutting or scaling down its non-core verticals. As part of this, it is shutting its B2B vehicle spare parts platform ‘Inspare’, which will result in 80 employees losing their jobs, the sources said.

The startup has informed employees of catalogue, procurement, sales, operations, and other teams of Inspare about its decision to shut operations and asked them to look for other jobs.

A detailed questionnaire sent to CARS24 didn’t elicit any response till the time of publishing this story. Instead, its founder Vikram Chopra posted on Linkedin that Inspare, which was in the “pilot” stage, has been shut down. However, he didn’t disclose the number of employees which were impacted by this decision.

“We assumed the market was ready to change. And the more we pushed for adoption, the clearer it became that it was not,” Chopra said in the post. 

The impacted employees are being offered a severance package as per their notice period, the sources told Inc42. 

Meanwhile, Inc42 has also learnt that 40 employees of the startup’s car servicing and maintenance platform ‘FourDoor’ have been laid off. CARS24 didn’t respond to questions about FourDoor layoffs as well.

Overall, over 120 employees from non-core business verticals of CARS24 are being laid off in the restructuring exercise, one of the sources said.

Notably, Chopra, in another LinkedIn post earlier this month, said that two platforms of CARS24 – FourDoor and on-demand driver hiring platform AutoPilot – would not be available to consumers. 

“These services remain important to our core transactions engine. But we are winding down the consumer-facing parts and doubling down on how they support the rest of the business,” Chopra said then. 

He added that CARS24 was having conversations with the employees of these verticals to assign them new roles as per the “skills and ambitions”.

“The startup is winding down operations of these verticals as they are struggling to achieve profitability. The businesses which are not minting profits are being shut,” one of the sources said. 

Founded in 2015 by Chopra, Ruchit Agarwal, Gajendra Jangid and Mehul Agrawal, CARS24 is an online marketplace for buying and selling used cars. Earlier this year, the IPO-bound startup also ventured into the new cars market.

Last month, the startup fired 200 employees in a restructuring exercise, which began immediately after it acquired homegrown automotive forum Team-BHP.

Last year, the Singapore parent of the Delhi NCR-based startup infused INR 250 Cr in CARS24, which has raised about $1.3 Bn since inception from the likes of SoftBank, Alpha Wave Global, Commercial Bank of Dubai, among others. CARS24 was valued at $3.2 Bn in its last funding round.