Startups in India have gained a momentum over years. India recently reached the tally of 100 unicorn startups. Estimated collective valuation of these Startup companies is around $341 billion. With rapid growth in Indian Market, 20 start-ups achieved Unicorn status in August.
Most of these Companies found international investors and raised more than $94 billion.
Despite increase in number of unicorns in India, there are many companies burning cash to gain customers and register loss in their operations. User acquisition is one big aspect when it comes to raise funds for most startups.
Here is list of Top 10 Indian unicorn startups making huge losses.
BYJUs: ₹4,588 crore
OYO: ₹3,944 crore
Udaan: ₹2,482 crore
Flipkart: ₹2,446 crore
Eruditus: ₹1,934 crore
PhonePe: ₹1,728 crore
Paytm: ₹1,710 crore
Swiggy: ₹1,617 crore
Unacademy: ₹1,537 crore
Freshworks: ₹1,499 crore
These startups are consistently spending in marketing to gain more users and are in dire need to raise funds from different investors. After massive losses by unicorns, many startups are struggling to raise more funds, there has been a wave of layoffs as well.
Loss making and Layoffs
The downsizing by companies like Ola, Blinkit, BYJU’s (White Hat Jr, Toppr), Unacademy, Vedantu, Cars24, Mobile Premier League (MPL), Lido Learning, Mfine, Trell, farEye and Furlenco to navigate through the ‘funding winter’
Edtech start-up Vedantu reportedly fired 100 employees for the third time in 2022.
Nearly 300 Meesho employees were laid off after the company’s grocery vertical Superstore was shut down.
Agritech startup DeHaat fired a significant number of employees recently made to the news.
Another company LEAD and social media platform Koo also joined the list.
It’s not like every company is Scaler are planning to hire over 600 resources by end of December, 2022.
Moreover loss making startups will continue to fire and hire people as per their business requirements but this is also a fact that in a country like India, which is big consumer market, opportunities are there if you create a loyal customer base.
BYJU’s for example may have recorded huge loss of over 4500 crores but it is now the first go to name when it comes to online learning. They have acquired India’s top education Academies and rebranded everything, it cost them a lot of funds but the company has more than 100 million registered students today.
