Udaan saw revenue fall by over 40% in FY23; losses narrow by 20%

Udaan had trimmed its workforce by 10 percent in November which impacted around 350 people

Udaan, the e-B2B (business-to-business) platform saw its operating revenue fall in FY23, a year when several new-age companies were beginning to shift focus from growing their scale to improving their bottomline.

As a result, the Lightspeed-backed company, which sells groceries and other products to kirana stores who further resell to customers, saw its revenue from operations shrink by 43 percent from Rs 9,897.3 crore in FY22 to Rs 5,609.3 crore in FY23, according to regulatory filings sourced from TheKredible.

At the same time, the Bengaluru-based company managed to narrow its losses to Rs 2,213.0 crore in FY23 from Rs 3,075.8 crore in FY22. The improvement was largely because of reduced employee expenses and lower expenditure on other items.

Udaan’s staff costs dropped from Rs 1,203.5 crore in FY22 to Rs 996.2 crore in FY23, according to filings by Trustroot Internet Private Limited, the company, which operates Udaan in Singapore. Employee expenses could also be lower because Udaan trimmed its workforce by 10 percent in November, which impacted around 350 people.

More recently, Udaan even lost its chief technology officer and chief business officer as it merged and spun off units.

Filings also showed that other expenses for Udaan also halved from Rs 1,968.3 crore in FY22 to Rs 1,0436 crore in FY23. In FY23, Udaan’s expenses totalled to Rs 7,775 crore, which was about 40 percent lower than roughly Rs 13,000 crore in FY22.

Founded by former Flipkart executives, Sujeet Kumar, Amod Malviya and Vaibhav Gupta in 2016, Udaan has raised over $1.5 billion from investors like Tencent, DST Global and several others. It was last valued at $3.1 billion as per Tracxn, a private markets data provider.

While Kumar and Malviya stepped down from active roles in 2022, they continue to hold equity in the company. CEO Gupta, Kumar and Malviya collectively hold 22.6 percent in Udaan, while Microsoft, Noumra and others hold the remaining, Tracxn showed.