ShareChat latest unicorn to lay off staff with 20 pct cut; Amazon’s open software jobs plummet – report

One Thing Today in Tech

ShareChat, yesterday, joined a growing list of Indian startup unicorns that have laid off employees amid a funding winter. The company has laid off 20 percent of its workforce to conserve cash, as the current global economic slowdown has made it harder to raise funding, according to multiple reports. The desi social media venture is among the most funded startups in India. Also in this brief, a Swiss entrepreneur is launching a privacy-first smartphone operating system based on a version of Android, and a Chinese company has built the world’s biggest wind turbine.

Notes:

ShareChat, yesterday, joined the growing list of Indian startup unicorns that have laid off employees amid a funding winter. The company has laid off 20 percent of its workforce to conserve cash, and as the current global economic slowdown has made it harder to raise funding, The Hindu reported on Jan. 16, citing the company.

As many as 500-600 people may have been laid off, according to a report from Mint on Jan. 16. In December, ShareChat shut its fantasy gaming platform Jeet11, resulting in about 100 employees being laid off, according to Mint.

Mohalla Tech, ShareChat’s parent company, announced $520 million in funding led by Google, in June 2022, which privately valued the desi social media venture at $5 billion.

ShareChat will provide employees total salary for notice periods, and two weeks’ pay for every year served while allowing employees to retain their work assets.

Employees will also receive health coverage until June 2023, with the ability to encash their leave balances of up to 45 days as per their gross salary. Employees’ stock options will also continue to vest up till April 2023.

The tech job scene continues to worsen globally as we head into 2023. For example, “the hiring party is over at Amazon,” Slashdot reported yesterday, citing the low number of open jobs in the Software Development category at Amazon.

The number has declined to 299 in January 2023 from 32,692 in May 2022, according to Amazon's Jobs site, Slashdot reports.

Apostrophy AG, a Swiss software startup, is set to unveil a smartphone operating system that puts privacy first, according to a Bloomberg report that appeared in SwissInfo on Jan. 16.

Founder Petter Neby, who already has one company selling high-design, low-tech mobile phones, has put together more than 50 employees globally and is raising 10 million euros ($11 million) this year, according to the report.

The company’s software, named AphyOS, is built on an open-source version of Android called GrapheneOS.

China’s MingYang is launching its latest wind turbine with blades that span 140 meters, or about as tall as a 70-storey building, NewAtlas reports. The MySE 18X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built, and it is meant to be deployed in offshore wind farms, according to the report.

The number of science and technology research papers published has soared over the past few decades, but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature, Nature reports.

The researchers, Michael Park and Russell J Funk, from the University of Minnesota, and Erin Leahy from the University of Arizona, looked at data from millions of manuscripts. They published their findings in Nature on Jan. 4.