Livspace Layoffs: Livspace layoffs: Residence design startup cuts almost half of tech, product roles

Omnichannel dwelling interiors and renovation platform Livspace has laid off about 2% of its total workforce in a bid to drive profitability by the monetary 12 months ended March 2024.

The retrenchment has affected 45% of its know-how and product groups, three folks accustomed to the matter instructed ET. A complete of 36 staffers, together with software program engineering builders and administrators from a group of 80 have been requested to go away the corporate, these sources mentioned.

“We’re taking all the required steps to make sure we offer workers with a clean transition within the type of an help bundle, prolonged medical insurance coverage and vital outplacement providers wherever potential inside our community,” an organization spokesperson instructed ET.

Based in 2015 by Ramakant Sharma and Anuj Srivastava, Livspace, which is valued at $1.2 billion, supplies a three-sided market and design automation platform that connects householders, licensed designers and distributors.

Its buyers embrace non-public fairness main KKR, Ingka Group Investments, a part of IKEA mother or father firm Ingka Group, Jungle Ventures, Venturi Companions, Peugeot Investments, amongst others. Until date it has raised $450 million from buyers.

Livspace employs a complete of 5,000 workers. It’s unclear if the layoffs included non-tech workers.

“There’s loads of stress on them to ship on profitability and therefore the layoffs… Any work that isn’t involving profitability is now being taken out,” one of many sources mentioned. The individual added that the Bengaluru-based startup has been reducing prices via cutting down on software program providers, transferring plans from premium to primary since September 2022.The affected workers – who have been knowledgeable concerning the layoffs from Thursday to Saturday in conversations with a human sources govt and chief know-how officer Praveen Kumar – will obtain severance packages of the variety of weeks that equate to the variety of years served on the startup, one other of the sources mentioned.

“In an organization of our measurement, we are going to, within the regular course of our operations, redeploy sources. That is natural and a mirrored image of changes and/or efficiency administration parameters,” a spokesperson mentioned in response to ET’s request for remark.

In October final 12 months, Livspace had earmarked a corpus of $100 million for acquisitions to go deeper in present geographies, add new classes to its core choices in addition to introduce extra margins to its total enterprise.

Earlier, in 2020, Livspace had laid off 450 workers, 15% of the overall workforce because of the impression of the Covid-19 induced lockdowns.

Startups throughout the board have taken to layoffs to increase their money runways with a funding winter hitting development and late stage firms in 2023, mature tech firms like Dealshare, GoMechanic, MohallaTech, Swiggy, Dunzo, Ola, Cashfree, Byju’s, Vedantu, Unacademy have additionally downsized employees.

Earlier this month, Livspace competitor HomeLane too undertook a cost-cutting train that led to termination of a major chunk of the corporate’s know-how and product roles, a group that had about 100 folks.

“We did should resize as a result of we needed to lower down on some fastened prices. All of us have had to do that…we aren’t proof against this,” founder and CEO Srikanth Iyer instructed ET. HomeLane’s transfer was additionally aimed toward driving profitability.

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