Ola Lays Off Employees In Restructuring Exercise

The company did not disclose the number of employees affected following the move.

“We regularly conduct restructuring exercises to improve efficiencies, and there are roles which are now redundant. We will continue making new hires in engineering and design including senior talent in our key priority areas," an Ola spokesperson said.

A report by news platform Inc42 said around 200 employess may have been handed pink slips as part of the exercise. Those sacked are from the parent firm, Ola Cabs, and from its subsidiaries Ola Financial Services Pvt Ltd and Ola Electric, the report said.

“It is a business restructuring and rationalization (exercise). There will be new hires in focus teams," the spokesperson said, adding that the firm may ramp up hiring in several verticals including engineering and design.

The development comes after the SoftBank-backed firm had rescinded its plans to lay off about 200 employees from its engineering roles, in September.

The ride-hailing platform, this week, also shut down its neobanking firm Avail Finance, which it had acquired in March 2022. It plans to merge Avail Finance with its subsidiary Ola Money and has stopped lending via the neobanking platform, The Economic Times had reported.

Ola joins a slew of technology startups that have let go of their employees to optimize their costs, with edtech sector seeing a flurry of layoffs.

Last week, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform Moglix had terminated about 3% of its workforce, roughly amounting to 30-40 employees in an exercise to cut costs.

In December, Oyo also announced its plans to fire about 600 executives across its technology and product teams owing to its plan to shut down projects and merge teams. The company had said that it was hiring 250 executives in sales.