Indian fintech unicorn Open lays off 47 employees
Indian neobank for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Open Financial Technologies, has laid off 47 employees, becoming the latest in a string of fintech firms to make job cuts.
Open lays off 47 employees
The Bangalore-based firm says the cuts were based on employee performance. Its founders have also taken a 50% cut in their salaries in a bid to support its growth and profitability.
“Our recent staffing changes were driven solely by performance evaluations, and some support functions were outsourced to manage growth and scale,” Anish Achuthan, co-founder and CEO of Open, says in a statement.
Achuthan adds that Open is “one of the very few start-ups with visibility on profitability and runway above 30 months” and is well placed to face challenging market conditions.
The company stresses that it is “actively hiring across critical functions” such as growth marketing, product and sales, with no salary reductions for existing employees and pay rises for high achievers.
In May last year, Open raised $50 million in a Series D funding round led by IIFL, taking the company’s valuation to $1 billion and making it India’s 100th unicorn.
Founded in 2017, Open claims to have built Asia’s first digital banking platform for SMEs, start-ups and freelancers. It currently serves more than 2.5 million SMEs and processes more than $30 billion in transactions annually.
