Udaan Fires 120 Employees Within A Week Of Raising $340 Mn

Bengaluru-based business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce unicorn Udaan has fired close to 120 employees, just within a week after scooping up $340 Mn in its Series E funding round.

Although, it could not be ascertained which verticals were impacted by the layoff, but as per Moneycontrol’s report, the downsizing has majorly affected staff across marketing, finance and operations.

Confirming the development to Inc42, an Udaan spokesperson said that the company is working towards providing all requisite support to the impacted employees, which includes medical insurance and compensation package.

“Over the last few years, we have made significant investments to build a solid and sustainable business. We believe in efficiency as a driver of profitable growth and are continuously making efforts to enhance efficiency, grow business sustainably and further improve customer experience,” the spokesperson said.

“We have already made significant progress in our journey towards building a profitable business and continue to make relevant interventions to our already proven business model, while remaining customer-centric and agile. However, these interventions have also resulted in some redundancies in the system,” the spokesperson added.

Founded by Vaibhav Gupta, Sujeet Kumar and Amod Malviya, Udaan enables supply chain and logistics operations focused on B2B trade. It claims to enable daily delivery across over 1,000 cities and 12,500 pin codes through udaanExpress. It counts the likes of Lightspeed, Microsoft and Tencent among its backers. 

Last Thursday, the company raised fresh capital led by UK-based savings and investment firm M&G Prudential, with participation from its existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and DST Global.

Udaan plans to use these funds to further strengthen customer experience, market penetration, and strategic vendor partnerships, and to reinforce long-term supply chain and credit capabilities.

Earlier, Udaan conducted operations with a nationwide scope but has recently opted for decentralisation. Each warehouse now houses multiple products spanning categories such as FMCG, Food, Lifestyle, etc, as per the report.

In the past, the FMCG team operated on a national level; however, the new approach involves organising operations on a cluster basis. This means that distinct teams will be assigned to different clusters, each responsible for overseeing all products within their designated cluster, regardless of categories.

In FY23, Udaan saw its operating revenue shrink by 43% to INR 5,609 Cr from INR 9,897.3 Cr in the previous fiscal year.