Jeff Bezos backed Lummo lays off 50-60 employees from its Bengaluru office

Indonesia-headquartered software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Lummo with a presence in India recently laid off around 50-60 employees from its Bengaluru office.

The lay-offs of Indian employees, which happened on the morning of June 7, come after around 100-120 employees were terminated from the Jakarta office.

A current employee at Lummo, on conditions of anonymity, told Moneycontrol the mail came as a shock to many of his colleagues. He said, "It was a surprise to a lot of employees. Indians did not receive any communication apart from direct email. Indonesia had a meeting and emails came in after the meeting."

Another employee said, "Reason given wasn't clear. It was around: role redundancy, restructuring, identifying what product build before growing, cost-cutting to improve the runway, and so on." He added the reasons given do not justify why specific employees were terminated.

He also informed that the company has assured a severance pay along with a promise that the salary dues would also be settled.

The layoffs were first reported by Inc42 which said that the startup is shifting its focus away from LummoShop, thus resulting in restructuring. Sources say while that could be one of the reasons, there was no official communication from the company on it.

Recently in January 2022, the startup, formerly known as BukuKas had raised $80 million in its Series C funding round led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India, with participation from Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos.

In addition, recently, Sequoia Capital, one of the world's largest venture capital (VC) firms told its founders that the era of being rewarded for hypergrowth at any costs is quickly coming to an end with investors shifting towards companies who can demonstrate current profitability.