LocalOye lays off 60 employees as part of restructuring its call servicing unit

This is a result of the local services' startup's growing focus on automating the entire process of hiring service professionals

LocalOye, a local services provider, on Monday announced that as part of a restructuring it was laying off 60 employees, mainly from its call servicing unit. This is a result of the startup’s growing focus on automating the entire process of hiring service professionals. The full and final settlements to the relieved employees have already been completed, said the company.

Aditya Rao, founder and chief executive officer, LocalOye, told Business Standard that discussions around laying off employees had been on for three to four weeks. "We took the decision a week back and have been executing since then.’’ There are areas where the company can make use of technology and there is no need for manual work, Rao said.

“We have made sure that this does not happen again and hence for the next three months we will not be doing any mass hiring in the services segment. However, we will continue to hire in the technology and product segments.’’ While he refused to comment on the sectoral trend of sacking employees, Rao said, ‘’we had to align to the market scenario and sooner we did it, the better for us. We also realised that to be a much stronger player we needed to take this decision right now.’’ Rao said that there are certain categories in which the company will reach break-even stage, but there are categories that will take a real long time. The company had raised $5 million in April this year from Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

"From fund perspective we are comfortable for the next 15-18 months and will hit the road to raise next round of funds in 2016.

One of the investors in the company said, a lot of start-ups have been on a hiring spree when they could have made use of technology. ‘’Meanwhile in India the number of investors who can invest money in a Series B round of funding are very few. Add to this investors would want to focus and invest in their Unicorns rather than other players. Hence we are seeing a lot of rationalisation among the Indian start-ups.’’

The first step of rationalisation would be removing additional headcount, it is believed.

LocalOye started in the year 2013. It currently operates across three cities – Mumbai, Bengaluru and NCR. The start-up offers 90+ services to the customers across six major categories – Home Services, Education Services, Beauty Services, Health & Fitness Services, Event Planning Services and Online Consultancy Services.

The company is backed by investors such as– Sidharth Rao (founder of Webchutney), Haresh Chawla (investor in Housing.com, Burrp.com, Askme.com, Bookmyshow.com) who is the former Network18 CEO, Sachin Bhatia (Co-founder of MakeMyTrip.com), Tiger Global Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.