Exclusive: Nova Benefits lays off 30% of its workforce

The wave of layoffs striking Indian startup shores continues, even as the funding climate turns tepid. This time it is SIG-backed employee wellness startup Nova Benefits that is ‘restructuring’ to stay in the game.

Nova has fired 30% of its workforce, joining several early-stage startups which have gone through layoffs in the past few months, said two people aware of the details.

The development comes at a time when the Bengaluru-based startup is in talks to raise around $30 million in a new round.

“Nova management suddenly called for a town hall meeting to announce the layoff and all impacted employees couldn’t login following the announcement,” said one of the sources on the condition of anonymity. Perhaps a signal to the survivors that their wellness remains important, despite what they see around them.

Two-year-old Nova helps enterprises improve employee wellness through health insurance, daily fitness and mental health counselling and wellness. The company claimed that over 300 companies are insured with Nova Benefits with more than 100,000 members covered, and 4,000 claims processed.

The company’s top clients include DTDC, Taco Bell, MyGate, PharmEasy, CoinDCX, Chumbak, HomeLane, TeachMint and Zenoti, among others.

“The company had already fired around a dozen employees a few weeks ago but this time a significant chunk of employees have been fired without any prior notice,” said the second source who also wished not to be named.

The exact number of employees impacted by the layoff couldn’t be ascertained. As per Nova’s LinkedIn profile, it has around 200 employees on the platform. Recently, the company had said that it asked around 10 employees to leave as a part of restructuring.

Queries sent to Nova's founder did not elicit an immediate response.

Early this week, B2B e-commerce platform Udaan had let go of  180 employees. As per media reports, more than 10,000 employees have been impacted during the layoffs across startups in the past few months. Apart from growth stage firms, many early stage startups such as Frontrow, Yojak, Udayy and Lido also fired their employees recently. Of course, a couple of them such as Udayy and Lido shut their operations down altogether, making the retrenchments inevitable.