SaaS Startup Actyv.ai Fires 60 Employees Months After Raising $12 Mn

SaaS startup Actyv.ai has fired 60 employees, or around 50% of its 120-strong workforce, a few months after it closed a $12 Mn Pre-Series A round. Employees from the product, marketing, HR, sales and solutioning teams at Actyv.ai were impacted by the layoffs, sources told Inc42. 

Actvy.ai fired the employees during a town hall meeting on Monday (July 31), the sources said, adding that the startup offered one month’s salary as severance pay to the impacted employees.

“We value the dedication and commitment of each team member during this transition period, and we believe that these measures will position us for a stronger and more resilient future,” said Raghu Subramanian, founder and global CEO of the startup, in a statement.

The CEO added that the move will ensure that “our valuable resources are allocated strategically, becoming a leaner, more agile and tech-forward company.”

Entrackr was the first to report the layoffs at Actyv.ai. The publication also added that the leadership team has been asked to work without any salary till December or until the next funding round. However, Inc42 could not independently verify this.

Several Actyv.ai employees have already posted ‘open to work’ on their LinkedIn timelines.

The development comes months after the SaaS startup announced the close of a $12 Mn (INR 96 Cr) Pre-Series A fundraise from Singapore-based 1Digi Ventures, Subramanian’s family office, in January 2023.

Founded in 2019, Actyv.ai is an AI-powered software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that is used by large enterprises to transform their supply chains and offer financial products. After its last fundraise, the startup claimed that it had partnered with more than 20 institutions and over 25,000 distributors and 1 Lakh retailers were onboarded on the platform.

With the layoffs, Actyv.ai has joined a growing list of Indian startups issuing pink slips to their employees, mostly to save costs and reduce burn rate amid the ongoing funding slowdown. Earlier this week, Inc42 exclusively reported about SaaS startup Increff laying off around 60 employees, or 20% of its workforce, in a cost-cutting exercise.

As per Inc42’s ‘Indian Startup Layoff Tracker’, nearly 110 Indian startups have fired 28,000+ employees since the start of 2022, as markets across the world remain volatile due to several macroeconomic and geopolitical factors.

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