Online food-ordering startup TinyOwl to lay off over 100 employees more

The company had also downsized its offices in four of the six cities, including Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Delhi.

Harshvardhan Mandad, the company’s co-founder said that “The current strategic focus for us as a company is to build TinyOwl as a sustainable, profitable and scalable business, working towards the “big dream”.

In an official statement, the company said that it has undergone an organizational restructuring to increase its efficiency and productivity, involving eliminations of certain positions from the company, as part of this process.

In alignment of the current organization focus, TinyOwl will be scaling back nationally, with optimization of resources across verticals being the key focus.

“But I believe a few hard steps need to be taken for the best interests of the company and to stay true to its vision in the longer run”, he wrote.

24-year old co-founder Choudhary was reportedly held at the office since Wednesday, after delivering news of the layoff to employees. “We were just told we had lost our jobs”, an employee told Business Standard. “We thank all our employees for their contributions in making TinyOwl one of the fastest growing startup brands in the market today”.

Employees said that Goyal promised a meeting the next day but didn’t turn up, and instead there were eight security guards. A few of the employees present at the office are from the previous round of layoffs which took place on the 31st of August this year.

In a few cases, like the Chennai office, employees demanded a range of things including assistance in finding jobs and a final salary payment.

Update: Gaurav Choudhary was finally allowed to leave the Pune office, according to MediaNama but he declined to share how he was allowed to go. Questions are being raised on how the layoffs were communicated and processed, as the entire group of employees were informed during the day and given the option to leave the same day or serve their notice periods.

Eventually, police responded to Choudhary’s emergency call to address the issue, and local politicians also arrived on the scene to help resolve the situation.

Choudhary told MediaNama that TinyOwl could have sacked people over email, but made a decision to send one co-founder to each city, in order to do this in a more “human” way. “Until we get a written confirmation from them that no physical harm will be caused to any of us, we are not going to clear the dues”, a company source added. Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal are a few of the investors in the company.