Visitors to the Localbanya website are greeted with this message: “Your banya is upgrading his technology and services. We will be back shortly with more exciting features and a far better delivery experience. We can’t wait for you to experience the new and improved Localbanya”.
Meanwhile the inside story might be very different.
Rahul Yadav, the erstwhile CEO of Housing.com, has come out in support of the beleaguered TinyOwl cofounders. The cofounding team of TinyOwl has been under fire over its recent layoffs, and one cofounder was held hostage in its Pune office for over 2 days by irate employees. However, Rahul Yadav, who’s no stranger to controversy himself, had words of encouragement for the TinyOwl team.
Sanjiv Bikhchandani, Chairman of Info Edge which owns 47% of Zomato, has justified Zomato’s layoffs saying that the funding environment for startups is changing.
India’s population is exploding, and its urban infrastructure is struggling to keep pace. While startups are solving problems ranging from food delivery to laundry, there’s not enough interest among the startup community towards building smarter cities. That’s where Microsoft, in collaboration with the Indian government, comes in.
In the latest of firing news, Bangalore based ad tech startup Vizury is laying off 50 off its employees. However, the real number of the layoffs is rumoured to be upwords of 100.
After announcing 600 layoffs in September, the realty listing startup has decided to let go another 200 employees, totalling 800 or almost 50% of its 1950 strong workforce.
The food tech crisis is getting messier. After TinyOwl’s second round of layoffs in as many months in which the company let go of a hundred employees and shut down several city offices, the company sent its senior to deliver the news in a “human” way. When cofounder Gaurav Choudhary reached the Pune office, he realized he’d got more than what he bargained for – he couldn’t get out.
A year ago, the food tech sector was booming. Funds were plentiful, investors were upbeat, and a new company seemed to be coming up every minute. Cut to a year later, and things aren’t quite so rosy. There have been murmurs of overvalued companies, and investors are being more circumspect with their cash. One sector that has been particularly hard hit is the food tech industry.
Paytm has announced that it will be splitting its original business wallet into a separate app. The current Paytm app will soon lose its wallet functionality and become a standalone shopping app, competing with the likes of Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. This move reinforces Paytm’s ambitions to become a large part of India’s ecommerce space.