Online food and grocery delivery platform Swiggy has sacked 380 employees as part of a “restructuring exercise” citing challenging macroeconomic conditions, with CEO Sriharsha Majety also attributing it to over-hiring.

Swiggy had close to 6,000 employees before the layoffs and it comes at a time startups are staring at a difficult funding environment, forcing them to prune costs. Last November, rival Zomato had fired 100 employees. Recently, ShareChat, the homegrown social platform, had also let go of 20 per cent of its employees.

In an internal email Majety, who apologised to the affected employees, said, “We are implementing a very difficult decision to reduce the size of our team as a part of a restructuring exercise. In this process, we will be bidding goodbye to 380 talented Swiggsters. This has been an extremely difficult decision taken after exploring all available options and I’m extremely sorry to all of you for having to go through with this.’’

The affected employees will get compensation of three to six months of salary depending on their tenure and grade. They will also be eligible for medical insurance cover till the end of May.

They will receive either an assured three months pay or notice period plus 15 days ex-gratia for every completed year of service plus balance earned leave according to the policy, whichever is higher.

“This includes variable pay/incentives at 100 per cent. Joining bonus, retention bonus paid out will be waived off,” Majety said.