VerSe, the parent company of Dailyhunt, has announced wage cuts and 5% employee layoffs
- ByStartupStory | November 29, 2022
The parent firm of the short video entertainment app Josh and the vernacular news aggregator Dailyhunt, VerSe Innovation, has laid off 150 employees, or 5% of its workforce, citing the present economic conditions.
With this decision, the business has joined several growth-stage businesses that have let go of staff members despite raising billions of dollars in the previous year. Since December 2020, the Bengaluru-based company has raised approximately $1,500 million, or $1.5 billion, including an $805 million round valued at $5 billion in April of this year.
“Considering the long-term viability of the business and our people, we have taken steps to implement our regular bi-annual performance management cycle and made performance and business considerations to streamline our costs and our teams,” said Dailyhunt in a statement. Along with receiving large sums of money, DailyHunt’s parent company also rose to the top of the list of loss-making startups in FY22. According to Fintrackr’s study, the company’s losses increased by more than 3X in FY22 and reached Rs 2,500 crore (more than $300 million). During the same period, its operating revenue increased by 45% to Rs 965 crore (about $120 million).
According to a DailyHunt spokesperson, a significant portion of the funds was used for marketing and creating an environment to support a creator economy for its Josh app.
Josh, a short video app, claims 139 million monthly active users as of April of this year, compared to DailyHunt’s 350 million MAU. Josh competes in the market for short video entertainment with ShareChat’s Moj, MX TakaTak, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels, among others, while DailyHunt competes with Inshorts in the news aggregation and hyper-local video sectors.
Growth-stage startups like Byju’s, Udaan, Unacademy, and ChargeBee are just a few of them that have turned to layoffs amid the financial crisis. Byju’s, an ed-tech unicorn, has announced plans to fire 2,500 workers. The company will probably let go of more than 12,000 employees in the upcoming year, according to a Morning Context article. Furthermore, Byju will have raised more than $1 billion by 2022. In their second round of layoffs earlier this month, B2B e-commerce platform Udaan and edtech business Unacademy each let go 300–350 staff, while SaaS unicorn ChargeBee let go 140. According to data collated by Fintrackr and other media stories, over 16,000 people have been let go by Indian companies overall.
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