Amid The Layoff Season, These Five Startups Are On A Hiring Spree
Over 11,000 employees have already lost their jobs due to a fundraising winter affecting startups in India. The situation could deteriorate further as over 60,000 jobs are likely to be lost over the next 18 to 24 months due to the expected continued lack of capital inflow.
Calculations by Business Insider India show that 25 businesses, mainly in the eCommerce and edtech sectors, have cut staff. The firing list also included seven unicorns: Ola, Blinkit, Unacademy, Vedantu, and Mobile Premier League (MPL).
Despite the pressure, research by GlobalData found that the value of money raised by startups increased by 28.6% between January and April of this year. Additionally, it stated that 672 venture capital agreements had garnered $12.1 billion for Indian firms up to April.
It implies that a select few, if not a select few, have the room and resources to develop. Here is a list of startups that want to hire more people this year.
1. E-learning startup Utkarsh to hire 500 people
With more than 5 million users registered, the Utkarsh App is the go-to learning platform for students preparing for academic and competitive exams. This startup seeks to give every student who wants to study an Affordable Quality Education. This startup is one of the few institutions that firmly believes in delivering high-quality education while attentively addressing technological innovations to give students the finest possible e-learning experience.
The Utkarsh App is a user-friendly study platform that offers paid courses and offers free e-courses like current affairs for all exams and five free sample tests for online courses to all students studying for exams.
By the end of FY23, edtech firm Utkarsh hopes to hire 500 people from tier 2 and tier 3 cities. It is concentrating on hiring from states like Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh that speak Hindi.
The startup intends to expand its new sales and customer service teams and add senior executives and educators.
2. Startup LeadSquared to ramp up its employee headcount by 800
LeadSquared is primarily a marketing automation platform that provides sales Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services. With its headquarters in India, LeadSquared was established in 2012. LeadSquared initially began as a marketing automation solution. But over time, as the team behind LeadSquared added more features to make the whole platform smarter and more effective, this platform has expanded greatly from its original state.
According to the official sources, LeadSquared’s main goal is to give its users the kind of help that improves overall efficiency and increases closure so they can easily manage their pipelines. This startup is primarily a marketing automation platform that provides sales Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services. With its headquarters in India, LeadSquared was established in 2012.
LeadSquared initially began as a marketing automation solution. But over time, as the team behind LeadSquared added more features to make the whole platform smarter and more effective, this platform has expanded greatly from its original state.
According to the official sources, LeadSquared’s main goal is to give its users the kind of help that improves overall efficiency and increases closure so they can easily manage their pipelines. And some of those benefits are mentioned below:
- Reduce overall lead leakage
- More intelligent and efficient lead prioritisation
- Automating various sales and marketing processes
- Providing detailed sales and marketing analytics
- Better integration with multiple business tools
- Comes with its own developer platform. This allows users to build a custom business logic that works for them in the best way possible.
Features Provided by Leadsquared:
- Capturing Leads across All Sources in an Accelerated and Automated Manner
Practically all marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms can automatically capture leads. What, then, sets LeadSquared apart in this regard?
The answer to this query can be found in the fact that LeadSquared completes this task quickly. It achieves this by providing integration with various platforms, offline and online conversations, phone calls, and lead capture connectors. It goes further beyond and integrates with different cloud enterprise communication platforms like Ozonete, Exotel, and Ameyo.
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Managing, Grouping, and Scoring Leads
In business, managing efficiently, scoring, and organising leads in addition to simply capturing them is crucial. This is precisely what LeadSquared’s feature accomplishes. Businesses may tailor the incentives and nurturing tactics they use to turn their prospective consumers into paying customers by categorising and ranking all of their clients.
In addition, startups can use SMS automation to handle and interact with leads. It is uncommon for traditional marketing automation platforms to provide this feature.
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Creating Customised Email Campaigns
You already know how crucial customised and visually appealing email campaigns are to turning your prospects into paying clients. LeadSquared can assist you in creating that kind of email campaign.
LeadSquared gives its users with a number of capabilities that let them drag and drop images, CTA buttons, and texts to improve the overall lead engagement in our organisation. This makes it possible to provide each customer with a highly customised experience.
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Highly Responsive Landing Pages
There’s a good chance that the type of landing pages your business has will determine the first impression it gives to customers. According to a Hubspot study, the number of landing pages a company has and its conversion rate are positively correlated.
With the help of a number of effective tools that come with LeadSquared, startups can easily develop landing pages that are highly responsive, attractive to the eye, and optimised. Users may quickly select from various lovely templates, create the content, and publish the page.
In addition to these essential capabilities, LeadSquared offers a conversion predictor, mobile customer relationship management (CRM), and the ability to build reports and analytics. Simply put, all of these qualities increase your company’s profitability.
However, setting up and launching LeadSquared for your company might be challenging.
LeadSquared, a SaaS-based marketing automation firm that recently became a unicorn after receiving $153 million in a Series C financing announced that it plans to treble its headcount in the next 18 months.
According to YourStory, this Nilesh Patel-led startup will hire 800 people over the next three months for roles in finance, product, engineering, delivery, and support.
3. HappyLocate startup plans to hire 600 people by FY23.
HappyLocate was established with the goal of revolutionising the relocation process in India.
The idea came from two business-minded men named Ajay Tiwari and Sainadh Duvvuru, who started their amazing journey with HappyLocate in January 2016. A smooth, end-to-end migration experience is the one goal 600+ enthusiasts are striving toward today after beginning with just 5.
This startup offers a wide range of relocation services, including packers and movers for moving residential or commercial property, moving logistics, moving vehicles, moving offices, moving laptops, moving pets, housing assistance, moving storage and warehouses, moving hotels, and other value-added services.
Moving management professionals continuously monitor and assess HappyLocate’s activities to choose service providers with in-depth local knowledge. Employee relocations at big businesses can be smoothly automated and managed with the help of the HappyLocate enterprise solutions tool XSAAS. At some of the major household names, such as Coca-Cola, ITC Infotech, Diageo, United Breweries, Airbus, etc., they are revolutionising the relocation process.
Using tools driven by AI and ML, they offer specialised solutions for moving needs based on the demands and feedback of the client. All of their ground staff members have also undergone training on how to pack, load, unload, unpack, transport, and operate with the highest professionalism and safety.
Values: HappyLocate is a team that prioritises the needs of its clients, and it bases its operations on three core principles: dependability, transparency, and convenience.
Backed By Investors
Active investors Inflection Point Ventures (IPV), VM Ventures, RMZ Management LLP, and Angel Investors support HappyLocate.
The mentors at HappyLocate assist them in creating success. They have given them advice and assistance.
HappyLocate, a tech-based one-stop relocation platform, revealed its intentions to hire 600 individuals across six departments: sales, HR, accounts, operations, marketing, and technology.
The business plans to hire recent graduates from more than 50 universities and seasoned professionals from all over the nation.
4. Cybersecurity startup Sequretek will increase its staff to 500 people.
A cybersecurity company called Sequretek assists organisations in concentrating on their main goal rather than worrying about cyberattacks. This startup uses AI for the majority of its tasks, increasing productivity and cutting costs. The Sequretek startup narrative is filled with hustle and motivation.
Sequretek – Industry
According to the latest report by Markets and Markets, the cyber security industry is expected to touch close to $300 billion by 2023 and is currently growing at over 10%. As per their forecasts from 2017 to 2023, in 2019, the market size is expected to be over $160 billion. The factors triggering this growth are:
- Strict data protection laws are being implemented.
- Rising cyber terrorism.
- The growing need for SMEs to store data in the Cloud is giving rise to cloud-based cybersecurity solutions.
Founders and Team
Sequretek startup is backed by two founders – Pankit Desai and Anand Naik.
Since they both work in technology, it was obvious that they wanted to launch a company in that field. Anand’s decision to work in cybersecurity, a field he has been involved in for more than 20 years, seemed obvious. He served as the Saarc head for Symantec in India before founding Sequretek.
Vision and Mission
To reduce the cost of ownership and simplify security, Sequretek was established. It has long been assumed that maintaining a system’s security requires a specific number of products, frequent patching, and updates. At least 20 years ago, that was still true. Companies are increasingly concerned and, at the same time, unsure about how to step up their cyber defence due to the evolving digital landscape and the evolution of cyber-attacks into more complicated forms.
Many of them still adhere to the outdated belief that the most advanced things should be purchased. They are unaware of their lack of need, compatibility with other security solutions, the amount of system bandwidth they use, and whether or not they are slowing down the entire IT architecture.
They didn’t want to continue the traditional business model of forcing items down the throats of customers when they decided to found Sequretek in 2013. Additionally, because that is the key distinction in cybersecurity, they sought to create a flexible system that can detect, analyse, respond, and guard against a threat in almost real-time. Their goods are therefore developed on an AI platform that keeps track of millions of incidences worldwide. The startup also matches them in the Indian setting to reduce the number of instances to tolerable daily. Assisting organisations to concentrate their efforts on actual issues rather than chasing their tails.
With this strategy, they intend to realise our goal of streamlining security and lowering the cost of ownership for businesses.
Sequretek, a startup in the cybersecurity industry, will extend its workforce from 400 to 500 individuals across the US, Europe, and Asia.
Through a combination of products, platforms, and services, the company makes cybersecurity accessible and affordable.
5. Vivifi India will hire 1,000 more people
On July 9, 2016, VIVIFI India Finance Pvt. Ltd. was established to address the shortage of financing solutions for India’s sizable and expanding population of deserving but underserved consumers.
On March 31, 2017, VIVIFI received its Certificate of Registration as an NBFC-non-deposit-taking loan firm. VIVIFI was founded to operate as an NBFC in the unsecured retail consumer lending area.
With over 75 years of combined expertise in secured and unsecured retail lending, the founders of VIVIFI are technocrats and career bankers that offer credit to customers with all types of credit. The goal is to provide all customers interested with a wide range of practical, easily accessible financial and loan services in a safe, efficient, and professional environment, without any prejudices or biases, and exclusively based on the customer’s capacity to repay.
The first Personal Emergency Line of Credit in India, FlexSalary, was the flagship lending product of Vivifi when it first started off. Through its ground-breaking payment platform, FlexPay, the company is now offering a digital credit card experience to the underserved.
The modern AI-driven loan management system LENDEZ.AI, which is a proprietary product of VIVIFI, powers the majority of business activities.
Vision
With a focus on underserved and unserved customers, the startup’s objective is to provide Innovative Financial Products to customers throughout the Credit Spectrum using Technology and Data Science.
Approach
Through fully automated fulfilment, VIVIFI intends to become India’s largest lender by offering credit to non-prime borrowers. To do this, they plan to establish themselves as the go-to lender for salaried and self-employed people who are underserved and unserved and who have little to no access to credit by onboarding them with FlexSalary credit lines, which have a smaller value.
When a consumer exhibits prime-like conduct and exhibits excellent payback performance, VIVIFI, which believes in true risk-based pricing, works to upgrade them to a larger-value, longer-term instalment loan under the name Loan Granted.
The startup NBFC Vivifi India Finance plans to expand its staff in FY22 by adding 1,000 new team members from various fields.
With the headquarters staying in Hyderabad, the firm is also trying to broaden its geographic reach to newer areas, including tier 2 and tier 3 cities throughout India.
edited and proofread by nikita sharma
