India’s first unicorn InMobi has laid off close to 50 employees, amounting to nearly 3% of its 2600 strong workforce. The reason: performance evaluation. 

As per sources, the employees impacted by this layoff belong to the firm’s content-providing vertical Glance.

With this layoff, Softbank backed InMobi joins a list of 22 Indian tech companies that have laid off over 2000 employees in less than a month.

In response to an email asking the firm about the layoffs, the company said “InMobi / Glance is in the market actively hiring talent for our ambitious plans. We also evaluate the performance of our existing talent annually and make decisions based on it. This is business as usual for us and part of our annual process. This year is no different.”

Based in Bengaluru, InMobi was founded in 2007 by Tewari alongside Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta, Mohit Saxena, and Piyush Shah. The company’s advertisement serving algorithm helps in optimising the ranking of the advertisements shown on mobile phones. It became India’s first unicorn startup back in 2011. Two years later, Glance—owned by InMobi—an AI-first screen zero content discovery platform, also achieved unicorn status. 

In 2022, Glance also raised US$200 million from Jio Platforms Limited (Jio) in its Series D round of funding.

A Tragic Season of Layoffs 

Major tech players, including the likes of Amazon, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and Salesforce, have collectively let go of about 55,000 employees worldwide, that is, close to 3-6 percent of their total headcount.

Amid the fears of a global recession in 2023, many tech behemoths, including Microsoft, Spotify, Amazon, Meta, Lyft, HP, Twitter, Salesforce, and Cisco, were compelled to implement mass layoffs. Companies such as Netflix and Adobe too felt the heat of these cutbacks. While Cisco reduced its workforce by 5%, Salesforce announced plans to trim the employee count by 10%. Music streaming platform Spotify has also said it will shed 6 percent of its workforce, that is, 588 people. 

In a global restructuring effort, Twitter eliminated 7,500 positions, leaving a skeletal 20 staff members in India. Meta, too, let go of 11,000 employees. Interestingly, Apple, on a hiring freeze, has not laid off any employees.