Start-up setback: Grofers to trim 10% of its workforce, revokes 67 job offers

Gurgaon-based online grocery delivery platform, Grofers, is laying off 10 per cent of its workforce, citing difficult market conditions and revision in growth projection.

The SoftBank funded start-up has also revoked the job offers it made to 67 graduates from top educational institutions, most of them engineering graduates.

The move came around six months after Grofers shut operations in nine cities, becoming the latest start-up to face the blunt sluggish fundraising scenario in the ecommerce sector.

According to a report in LiveMint, Grofers Head Of Human Resources Rishi Arora, in a e-mail to the company employees, informed that the staff at its customer support and content team as well as human resources, will be the most affected by the decision. The Tiger Global-backed company reportedly, has a strength of 1,100 employees and thus, Grofers is planning to lay off around 100 people.

In a blog post, Grofers' co-founders Saurabh Kumar and Albinder Dhindsa said, "On why we had to take this step. In the past couple of months, we have been making some necessary strategic changes within the company. The changes we have made will, in our opinion, benefit our customers in the long term. However, these changes have made the new roles redundant and therefore, we are no longer able to continue with the offers we made a few months back."

In the past few months, several other start-ups like Zomato, Foodpanda and Snapdeal among others, retrenched their workforce due to pressure of becoming more profitable in the competitive start-up culture.