Treebo, a startup in the hospitality space is reported to have taken a sudden decision to downsize its employee count by 20%. It seems sudden because company appeared to be hiring people on an aggressive basis until recently. An Economic Times report quotes a source as saying that the reason behind this is the failure to secure funding.
Ruptub Solutions is the name of the company that owns and runs Treebo and offers around 11,000 rooms out of 500 properties listed on its platform. The company did witness a setback when MakeMyTrip, the country’s premier online travel site dropped Treebo properties from its site owing to an association with Oyo Rooms. This was around the same time last year. At that time too the company had parted company with around 80-90 employees.
According to an Entrackr report, around 50-55 employees have been asked to resign from corporate sales (B2B), quality, and business development functions. The report states that the reason for these employees being laid off is the company’s focus on profitability.
The information on the failed funding being the reason for the employees being fired has come from one of the affected employees who has said this is what was told to him by the regional head who delivered the bad news to him and his colleagues.
“Due to some unfortunate sequence of events at the company I worked with till yesterday, many of us have been asked to leave on an immediate basis. Though the exact number of layoffs is not yet out in public domain, a very large number of people have been hung out to dry. While it for sure has caused sudden and uninvited turbulence in our lives and the anger towards the management being obvious, I choose not to go on a public rant. It also seems ironical that only a few days ago, I was hiring people for my team. Those who didn't receive a call should consider themselves very lucky,” Rajeev Ranjan, who was the regional manager working out of Pune handling the offline sales(Travel Trade) vertical, said in a LinkedIn post.
It is not known why the fund-raising process seems to have fallen through. Rumours suggest an investment in Treebo was to have been made by global hospitality major Accor SA, and it was supposed to be $40 million ticket. Accor operates brands like Sofitel, Ibis, Raffles, Novotel, and Mercure, many of them in India as well.
There is one opinion which suggest the mighty Oyo Rooms which raised $1 billion recently has grown so strong and powerful that the smaller players are finding it hard to survive.