India’s ShareChat, a short video-sharing platform backed by Google and Temasek, announced on Monday that it has laid off around 20% of its employees as startups face mounting pressure from investors to cut costs.
“There is a growing market consensus that the current global economic downturn would be much more sustainable and as such we unfortunately need to look for further cost savings by reducing our team size,” ShareChat This was announced by Chief Executive Ankush Sachdeva in an internal memo obtained by Reuters.
Based in Bengaluru, ShareChat is valued at US$5 billion (approx.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the company had updated its website since the decision to cut staff.
Investors have become more wary of high valuations in a turbulent stock market that has hurt tech stocks around the world.
Indian startups raised US$24 billion (about Rs.1,95,400 crore) last year, down a third from 2021, and have laid off thousands of employees in recent months to cut costs and become profitable.
Last year, Reuters reported that ShareChat’s parent company has raised nearly US$300 million (around Rs.2.4 billion) in new funds from Alphabet Googlemedia giant time group and Singapore’s Temasek stockswhich values the social media company at nearly US$5 billion (roughly Rs. 40,700 crore).
According to the report, the fundraising round was Google’s second major investment in India’s short video space, following previous support Joschwhich competes with ShareChat’s sister company Moj.
Short video apps like Moj and Josh rose in popularity after India banned ByteDance in 2020 Tick tock and some other Chinese apps after a border conflict with China.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
