India's first unicorn inMobi lays off 50-70 employees: Report

India's first unicorn InMobi has fired 50-70 employees according to a report by Business Standard. Sources told BS that the laid off employees are from InMobi and its content-providing vertical, Glance. The Softbank-backed company has a workforce of 2,600 employees in all.

In an email, the Bengaluru-based company responded to the claims by saying, "InMobi / Glance is in the market actively hiring talent for the ambitious plans that we have. We also evaluate the performance of our existing talent on an annual basis and make decisions based on it. This is business as usual for us and part of our annual process. This year is no different."

InMobi was started by Naveen Tewari, a whizkid who studied at IIT Kanpur and Harvard with work stint at McKinsey in 2006. He started the company with his two friends at IIT - Abhay Singhal and Amit Gupta.
The company was initially called mKhoj (short for mobile khoj or mobile search) and it offered SMS-based search services.

The company even raised half a million dollars from Mumbai Angels in 2007. However, failing to find traction in providing SMS-based search services and it pivoted and rebranded itself as InMobi.
In 2011, the company attained unicorn status after it raised $200 million from Masayoshi Son-led SoftBank. Glance also became a unicorn in 2020 after it raised $145 million from Google. 

The job market has been witnessing very tough times. The last few weeks and months saw giants like Swiggy, Chargebee, BYJU’S, OYO, Cars24, Ola, and several others announcing layoffs.

Even tech majors have also jumped onto the bandwagon.

Alphabet Inc, Google's parent, announced it is eliminating 12,000 jobs in a staff memo on Friday. The cuts mark the latest to shake the technology sector and came days after rival Microsoft Corp said it would lay off 10,000 workers.