Cars24, the e-commerce platform for pre-owned vehicles, has laid off over 200-250 employees as part of a cost-cutting measure, according to three sources familiar with the development.
“Cars24 has laid off around 250 employees this month across its product and technology verticals,’ said one of the sources requesting anonymity.
The layoffs come at a time when the firm’s key rival, Spinny, has secured over $131 million in fresh funding from Accel’s Leadership fund, which focuses on doubling down on select portfolios globally.
According to sources, the SoftBank–backed company provided affected employees with standard severance packages.
Cars24 offers a wide range of services, including buying and selling of pre-owned cars, financing, insurance, driver-on-demand, FASTag, challan management, and scrapping, among other services..
In a statement to Entrackr, Vikram Chopra, co-founder and CEO of Cars24, said, “This is a tough decision. Over the past few weeks, we’ve had to part ways with around 200 employees across various functions. We are deeply grateful for their contributions. The layoffs are not about performance, but about structure and the bets we placed. We’ve learned that speed without clarity is expensive, and some projects and roles were added prematurely. Moving forward, we need to be more strategic and deliberate with our investments and team-building.”
Despite not raising any external funding in the last three and a half years, Cars24 secured $450 million in December 2021 from investors including SoftBank, Tencent, DST Global, and Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave. This funding round valued the company at $3.3 billion.
As per the startup data platform TheKredible, DST Global holds the largest external stake in Cars24, followed by KCK Limited. Its other notable investors include Peak XV, Alpha Wave, and Tencent.
The firm has not yet filed its FY25 numbers. In FY24, Cars24 reported a 25% year-on-year increase in revenue, from Rs 5,530 crore in FY23 to Rs 6,917 crore. Despite this, the company posted a net loss of Rs 498 crore and an adjusted EBITDA loss of Rs 318 crore for the same period.