InDrive, a global ride-hailing service rivaling Uber and headquartered in the Bay Area, announces massive layoffs affecting hundreds

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 negotiate a different rate through the inDrive app. The company says 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 said in a December interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business’ online publication. The firm says 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 made the difficult decision to increase efficiency through a 10% reduction in headcount,” the spokesperson said in a statement to SFGATE. “We postponed this step for as long as possible, as many of our peers made their own staff reductions.” 

The cuts were first reported by Russian journalist Dmitry Filonov. The company spokesperson declined to comment to SFGATE on more specifics of the layoff round.

InDrive got 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 country’s war with Ukraine.