Meesho fires 150 employees from its grocery business

Softbank-backed social commerce start-up Meesho has laid off 150 employees from its grocery business division, a week after the company announced integration of the vertical with the main app and rebranding the same to Meesho Superstore. A company spokesperson said that the number of impacted employees is nearly 150. The company further said that it will be offering severance packages and outplacement assistance to those impacted by the announcement.

The start-up ecosystem is currently witnessing a wave of layoffs with cost restructuring exercises underway after a funding boom last year.

“As we look to boost efficiencies in the light of the integration, a small number of full-time roles and certain third-party positions on six-month contracts at Meesho Superstore were reassessed to remove redundancies with the core business. To support those impacted by this restructuring, Meesho is offering severance packages and outplacement assistance to help them secure new opportunities outside the company. The redundancies do not impact any positions at the core Meesho marketplace business, where we continue to hire and grow talent,” as per Meesho’s blog post.

In terms of its grocery business, the company said that it has scaled the offering to six states – Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh –- that plan is to make it available in 12 states by the end of 2022.

Last week, we announced that we were integrating the grocery business within the core app to provide Meesho users a unified shopping experience, while driving stronger synergies across areas like customer acquisition, technology, product and talent, it added.

Last year Meesho raised $570 million in a Series F round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and B Capital Group. Existing investors Prosus Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Facebook also participated in this round. Other new investors include Footpath Ventures, Trifecta Capital, Good Capital and others. Following the raise, the company’s valuation has more than doubled to $4.9 billion.