Middle-Class Crisis, Ex-Haptik CEO's New Launch, and Credlix's Acquisition

India is entering a moment that feels surreal: companies are growing, markets are expanding, AI adoption is skyrocketing - and yet, tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs. IT majors and unicorns alike are letting go of workers not because business is down, but because productivity is up.

Over 50,000 tech workers have been laid off across Indian firms in the past 18 months, and the majority were replaced not by cheaper humans, but by software. Dukaan bragged about cutting 90% of its support team and plugging in an AI chatbot. Freshworks is streamlining sales ops with automation. Infosys and TCS have quietly slowed lateral hiring because internal AI tooling is handling work that once needed entire floors of engineers. This isn’t a cyclical recession - it’s a structural rewrite of the employment equation.

The scariest part is where the cuts are landing. These are not entry-level layoffs. They are hitting the middle: 35-45-year-old project managers, L1 and L2 engineers, support leads, QA testers - the exact layer that once formed India’s proud and stable tech middle class. These people bought homes, funded school fees, supported aging parents, and believed tech jobs were untouchable. Suddenly, they are discovering that the stability they assumed was really a privilege of a different era - one where humans scaled faster than machines.

A new kind of inequality is emerging - not between rich and poor, but between those who can work with AI and those who can be replaced by it. On one side, organisations are throwing crores at LLM engineers, MLOps specialists, and cybersecurity experts. Salaries have jumped 2-3×, with AI specialists easily clearing ₹1.2-1.6 crore CTC in Bengaluru. On the other, customer service reps earning ₹3-6 lakh annually, 1.6 million Indians in that sector alone, are at direct risk of seeing their roles vanish, permanently.

We romanticise “reskilling” as the fix. But let’s be honest: a 40-year-old ops professional isn’t magically becoming a machine learning engineer in six months. Even the ones who try face brutal math: 12-18 months of study, no income during transition, and zero guarantee they get a job paying even close to what they once earned. The ladder is moving faster than people can climb it.

Tech founders aren’t doing this out of cruelty. They’re doing it out of survival instinct. Investors are done funding headcount vanity. Profitability is the new oxygen. And the founder who automates survives; the one who doesn’t, dies. When AI saves millions, the boardroom isn’t debating “people impact” - it’s celebrating EBITDA gains. AI creates shareholder value faster than humans ever could. The market rewards efficiency, not empathy.

And while the United States has unemployment benefits and Europe has worker protections, India has… hope. We have no social safety net for high-skill displacement. We built a system where IT and startups became the only reliable upward mobility path for millions. And now that path is narrowing.

AI didn’t come to help humans. It came to replace tasks. And tasks add up to jobs.

This isn’t a correction. This isn’t a pause. This is a reset.

We spent 20 years building a tech economy that needed millions of workers. Now we’re building one that may need half. The question that matters is simple: can India build an AI economy that includes the people who built our digital economy? Or will we watch the middle class that powered India’s rise get left behind - while the future marches on without them?

Because here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud: the jobs that AI eliminates are not coming back.

Let’s go through what else is happening in Indian startup world - Grab your simmering cup of StartupChai.in and unwind with our hand-brewed memes.

“How Ya Doin’ Fellow Kids”: Ex-Haptik CEO Launches AI-Focused VC Fund Activate

Activate is the newest AI-loving kid on the venture capital block, founded by Aakrit Vaish and Pratyush Choudhary to hunt for India’s next big AI-native disruptors.

Backed by a $75 Mn war chest, they’re eyeing everything from cutting-edge applications to the foundational models powering them. In short, if your startup speaks fluent machine intelligence, these folks want to swipe right.

Read more here

“Hum Saath Saath Hai”: Moglix-Owned Credlix Acquires Majority Stake In NBFC Vanik Finance

Credlix just turned its long-time buddy Vanik Finance into family, grabbing a majority stake for about ₹80 Cr to turbocharge digital supply chain financing.

Now fully under the Credlix brand, Vanik’s “credit in under 24 hours, no hard collateral” promise is getting a tech upgrade with smarter analytics. It’s all aimed at giving MSMEs and exporters quicker cash flow, because waiting for money is so last decade.

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“It’s The Time To Disco”: Flipkart Appoints Former Meta Executive Dan Neary To Its Board Ahead Of IPO

Flipkart is gearing up for its blockbuster IPO, and it just added a power player to the board: former Meta APAC VP Dan Neary.

With 35 years of global experience plus board seats and advisory roles galore, he’s the guy you call when you want to level up. It’s another smart move as Walmart-backed Flipkart builds its dream team for the big public debut.

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1. CoreOps.AI has scooped up $3.5 Mn to supercharge its mission of helping enterprises ditch clunky legacy systems and automate the boring stuff. With smarter workflows and AI agents in the mix, it wants to make efficiency feel effortless.

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2. Planys Technologies has raised ₹100 Cr to speed up its defence tech push while scaling its underwater inspection business across global waters. With thousands of hours logged by its unmanned vehicles, it’s diving deeper into innovation for militaries and marine industries alike.

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3. Mirror Security has secured $2.5 Mn to sharpen its AI cybersecurity armour and break into the US market. Its fully homomorphic encryption tech keeps enterprise data protected even while AI is busy crunching it.

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4. Ultraviolette has charged up with $45M in fresh Series E funding, welcoming Zoho and Lingotto to its growing pit crew. With momentum from earlier investments this year, the EV maker is clearly riding full throttle toward a faster, cleaner future.

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