Bangalore based virtual messaging app Helpchat has let go of over 100 employees, Ankur Singla, co-founder and CEO of Helpchat said in a personal blog post yesterday. Singla said that with the company’s evolution, it tried to scale 2-3 teams from its previous model (possibly before rebranding from Akosha), but was not able to do it for all the teams. He added that there wasn’t enough work to support and that the company would focus on building the personal assistant, and stop taking complaints. Helpchat has also downsized its work from home (WFH) program for chat experts, also citing that it was difficult for the company to ‘control their behaviour’ such as attendance, training, response times among others. Meanwhile, Singla mentioned that they’re still hiring (engineers, product managers, category managers and analysts) for its other teams, the company has added 30 engineers, product managers and data scientists in the last 3 months in Bangalore and has grown 30 times in the last 6 months. In August, the company appointed Deena Jacob as its chief financial officer. Nifler acquisition: Last month, Helpchat acquired the Mumbai-based startup Niffler for an undisclosed amount, to expand its services to Mumbai and Pune faster, given Niffler’s presence in these markets and grow its business. The entire Niffler team joined Helpchat. It’s not clear if Niffler was to be merged into Helpchat or maintained as a separate service. At that time, Helpchat claimed to have a team of over 600 people, and use AI to automate query…
