Joining the string of layoffs in 2024, Zomato-backed fitness company Cult.fit has fired around 150 employees across various departments in an effort to cut costs, reported Moneycontrol. With this measure, the company is hoping to slow down the cash burn in the firm.
Fitness unicorn Cult.fit mostly laid off mid to senior level employees during these layoffs, reported Moneycontrol citing sources. The company is hoping to cut costs and better its financial health for the future.
Cult.fit, which has Zomato and Tata Digital as its core investors, currently has a cash burn of around ₹15 crore, the report said. Through the job cuts, Cult.fit is hoping to bring down the cash burn to around ₹10 crore.
"Cult.fit looks to lower its monthly cash burn by a few crores and bring it down to about ₹10 crore. With that target in mind, the company has let go of employees from the mid to senior level category lower employee costs," Moneycontrol quoted a source as saying.
While Cult.fit started as a tech-enabled online fitness platform, the company is now putting in more money to fully tranform into an offline gym chain. This restructuring in business is causing job cuts in the online department, especially in Sugar.fit, Carefit, and Cultfit divisions.
{{/usCountry}}While Cult.fit started as a tech-enabled online fitness platform, the company is now putting in more money to fully tranform into an offline gym chain. This restructuring in business is causing job cuts in the online department, especially in Sugar.fit, Carefit, and Cultfit divisions.
{{/usCountry}}Cult.fit laid off around 150 employees just as it has revealed plans to launch the company's initial public offering, preparing for a pre-IPO round of funding over the next 12 months.
Tech, IT layoffs in 2024
Cult.fit became the most recent company in the country to jump on the bandwagon of layoffs in India, which was triggered by Paytm. In just the first three weeks of January 2024, tech companies have laid off nearly 8,000 workers, said a Layoffs.fyi report.
Paytm was the first Indian company to announced layoffs in 2024, cutting over 1000 jobs across multiple departments. Just days later, e-commerce platform Flipkart announced that it will lay off 5-7 percent of its workforce in an effort to recuperate its losses.
On a global level, big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft in totality have laid off thousands of employees, with the Alphabet-owned company cautioning its employees for more job cuts in the near future.