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A recent survey by howindialives.com pointed out that in 2017, none of the unicorns had over 5,000 employees and now, 12 of them have breached that mark. Of these, edtech major Byju’s showed 21% growth in terms of increasing headcount and, the company currently has 58,000 employees. Delhivery, Paytm and Zoho are the three other companies that have over 10,000 employees. While Paytm hired more than half its employees ahead of its listing in 2021, Zoho increased the workforce by 1% on a month-on-month basis. Policybazaar, Flipkart, Rebel Foods, Five Star, Unacademy and NoBrokers are few other startups that have seen a significant rise in headcounts in the past 5 years.
Meanwhile, the 8 start-ups that have seen a sharp drop in headcount in the last five years are Snapdeal, ShopClues, Ola, Hike, CarDekho, Mu Sigma, BigBasket and MakeMyTrip.
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Year-on-Year growth
Regarding the rise on a year-on-year basis, howindialives.com survey showed that the highest was in 2018-19 when there was a 54% growth. But there was a massive drop in the following year, which coincided with the outbreak of covid-19. Between September 2019 and March 2020, the count of formal-sector employees with these 100 unicorns fell about 3%. Since then, it has again expanded by 60%. For March 2022, it has again dipped by about 2%.
Sectorwise growth
Over these years, the growth has also been dependent on how a particular sector is performing. For example, the ecommerce sector accounted for 21.3% of all formal sector employees among the 100 unicorns in January 2017. But this dropped to 12.9% in April 2022. Three other sectors that witnessed massive decline are groceries, travel and ride hailing.
For Oyo, the headcount that had peaked in 2019-20 with about 18,000 employees, now dropped to 3,000. Ola's workforce has dropped from 4,200 employees in 2017 to 1,600 in April 2022.
The ed-tech space has been the biggest growth story for the past 5 years with the headcount rocketing from 2,200 in December 2016 to about 65,000 in March 2022.