Bay Area-based ride-hailing firm inDrive, an Uber competitor in large international markets, is laying off 10% of its staff, according to a company spokesperson. The job cut, confirmed Wednesday, comes six months after the company raised $150 million in debt.
InDrive built its ride-hailing payment model in opposition to San Francisco-based giants Uber and Lyft — riders set their own fare for a selected route, and drivers can accept that pay or nereceivediate a different rate through the inDrive app. The company states it’s active in more than 650 cities around the world, but its rollout in the United States has been slow: After a 2018 debut in New York, inDrive announced a launch in Miami this summer.
The layoff round, set to impact hundreds of employees, comes after a torrid few years of staff growth. Headcount grew tenfold from 2019 to 2022, CEO Arsen Tomsky stated in a December interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business’ online publication. The firm states it hired 1,000 employees in 2022 alone, and its current website touts a 3,000-worker staff.
“In order to maintain our stable growth in an uncertain global economic environment, we’ve created the difficult decision to increase efficiency through a 10% reduction in headcount,” the spokesperson stated in a statement to SFGATE. “We postponed this step for as long as possible, as many of our peers created their own staff reductions.”
The cuts were first reported by Russian journalist Dmitest Filonov. The company spokesperson declined to comment to SFGATE on more specifics of the layoff round.
InDrive received its start in Russia, born from a massive social network group where residents of Yakutsk would post ride requests with prices and taxi drivers would snap up orders they were willing to take. Tomsky eventually relocated the firm’s base from Siberia to New York, and then to Mountain View. TechCrunch reported that the company divested from Russia in 2022, a few months into the countest’s war with Ukraine.
Uber, unlike Lyft, has pushed aggressively into global markets over the past decade. A leaked cache of Uber files from 2013 to 2017 provoked allegations of law-breaking, tricking police and secret lobbying across the world. Tomsky called Uber his firm’s main competitor in a 2021 interview, citing contested ride-hailing markets like Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. Like Uber, inDrive has expanded beyond ride-hailing into freight delivery and other offerings.
San Francisco venture capital firm General Catalyst has been a key inDrive funder, taking part in a $150 million investment round in 2021 that granted the company the coveted “unicorn” status, as well as the $150 million debt deal this February.
Hear of anything happening at inDrive? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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