SUMMARY
- Airmeet laid off 80% of its IT staff & 20% of its total workforce in a restructuring effort to focus on AI-powered features & reduce costs.
- The company, facing post-pandemic revenue struggles, has dismissed about 100 workers in the past 16 months to streamline operations.
- The firm’s latest restructuring involved significant layoffs, including IT and product teams, as it shifts towards enhancing AI-driven products and in-person R&D.
Virtual event firm Airmeet fired around 80% of its IT staff last month, completing its third restructuring exercise in roughly 16 months, according to Inc42 sources.
As part of the restructuring, the Prosus-backed business also let go of a few staff members from its product and design teams. The sources further stated that a total of about thirty workers, or 20% of Airmeet’s staff, were let go as the firm has been struggling to grow its revenue in the post-pandemic environment, thus the layoffs were part of a cost-cutting exercise. There may have been more employees who were affected by the most recent restructuring of the company. Vinay Kumar Jasti, CTO and co-founder of Airmeet, personally spoke with each affected employee to let them know about the layoffs.
CEO and co-founder of Airmeet Lalit Mangal confirmed the layoffs, telling Inc42 that “we have right-sized the team to focus on investing in better and more AI-powered features.”
After the pandemic the startup experienced a surge in demand as a result the firm attracted a lot of interest from various investors but Airmeet found it difficult to grow when the world opened up following the pandemic and virtual events began to witness a rapid downturn. This led the business to focus more on developing new goods as Lalit Mangal states, “We are already working on our second product which will be launched soon. Our outlook is to build a largely in-person R&D function, based in Bengaluru and wired with the latest AI-powered tools.”
According to some reports by Inc42, it’s been nearly 5 months since the firm fired about 20% of the staff to reduce expenses. Before that, in May 2023, the firm laid off at least 75 workers which sums up to a total of 100 workers that have been laid off over the last 16 months.
The startup states on its website that it has collaborated with over 4,000 companies, including Unilever, Ford, PwC, and Capgemini. It has garnered over $50 million in finance from partners including Accel, Peak XV Partners, Sistema Asia Fund, DG Daiwa Ventures, and Nexxus Global.
