India’s 100th Unicorn Open, Axes 47 jobs; founders take 50% pay cut
OPEN has recently fired 47 employees out of its 600-member team based on performance and skills.
India’s OPEN, a Neobanking unicorn has joined the league of fintech startups that are on the spree of laying off employees. The company has fired 47 employees based on their performance and not up to the mark skillets.
Although 47 employees from OPEN have been asked to leave, the company is actively looking to hire new candidates in areas of product development, growth marketing, and sales to carry on the expansion of business to serve its users’ needs.
OPEN, the 100th unicorn of India said in its statement that all four co-founders have together decided to take a 50% deducted salary. They mentioned that employees are not subjected to this.
The startup has not given any termination package, however, it has provided a salary for one month’s notice period to all the laid-off employees.
While speaking on this topic, Anish Achuthan, OPEN founder and CEO said that the motivation behind these changes was solely based on the performance of employees. He further stated that they are willing to give a hike of 20-30% to worthy employees whose performances have been high consistently.
At present, OPEN is hiring for multiple profiles and has a safe time of around 30 months.
The company plans to make OPEN a highly performance-driven organization as a part of its move to scale and profit. It is one of those few startups whose profits are well visible and is at a safe place to face the market conditions for about 30 months, as said by the cofounder.
The statement made by the company:
“OPEN understands that these kinds of changes can sometimes be difficult for everyone involved. As a part of scale-up and profitability, OPEN will continue the efforts to make a highly performance-oriented effective organization fit for scale. OPEN assures its customers and partners that its commitment to providing top-quality service remains unchanged. OPEN believes that these changes will ultimately help the company better serve its customers and position itself for continued growth in the years to come.”
Background
OPEN, is a neobanking platform that was launched in 2017 to help small-medium enterprises, freelancers, and startup organizations. Its idea was to become a one-stop solution for payments, banking, payroll, expenditure handling, and accounting. Presently, the platform has a count of more than 3 million SMEs registered and processes 30 billion dollars in yearly transactions. On a monthly basis, OPEN adds approximately one lakh SMEs.
This neobank became a part of India’s unicorn party in May 2022 upon getting funding of 50 million dollars in its Series D round of funding.
Reportedly, OPEN has garnered a 155% year-by-year rise in its loss of INR 167.5 crores in 2021-2022 due to an increase in its expenses. On the other hand, the company’s operational revenue hiked up to 617% in the financial year 2022 from INR 5.7 crores in the previous year.
The job cuts at OPEN now count it as the 92nd startup to lay off employees ever since the beginning of 2022. As per the reports provided by Indian Startup Layoff Tracker, so far 16 fintech companies including OPEN have fired 1400+ employees.
Parent Company
OPEN has also moved one step ahead with the launch of its end-to-end fintech platform named Zwitch which provides digital banking services and solutions for both fintech and non-fintech companies. The platform also has BankingStack, a modernized cloud native fintech for financial organizations to ease their work.
In around May, OPEN raised its Series D funding round and moved forward to becoming the 100th unicorn in India. The startup is backed by some of the top-notch investors such as Tiger Global, Angellist, Google, and Speedinvest.
