The brand claims that the layoff is a standard part of its annual employee appraisal process and not an effort to downsize
New Delhi: E-commerce roll-up firm UpScalio let go of its staff as per industry reports. Confirming the news, the company said it let go of 15% of its staff. As of September 2022, the company had a total of 200 employees, including an in-house customer experience team of 40 people. This means that the company laid off 30 people.
When contacted, a company representative said that the layoffs were part of its annual employee appraisal process to improve productivity and team efficiency.
“As always, we take a high bar on performance at UpScalio. Additionally, while UpScalio has been able to grow aggressively, we always keep a keen eye on profitability. As part of our standard annual employee appraisal process, in December, we have let go of 15% of our staff,” Ankur Singh, Head of People and Culture at UpScalio said to a query by IndiaRetailing.
Founded in April 2021 by Gautam Kshatriya, Saaim Khan, and Nitin Agarwal, UpScalio acquires majority stakes in high-growth online-first brands and helps them scale their business by 5-10X over a period of two to three years, giving founders an exit.
There has been a growing incident of laying off employees by startups. As per media reports more than 20,000 start-up employees were fired in 2022. While most of the start-ups fired employees due to funding crunch, market conditions, cost-cutting measures and a way to increase their runway, some like UpScalio also cited performance appraisal as the reason for the layoffs.