Hailo lays off technical staff to 're-balance' its business

23.04.2015
Now that taxi-hailing app Hailo has completed an overhaul of its underlying technical platform, it is letting go some of its London staff to focus more on its sales and business growth.

While the firm did not confirm whether the 17 job losses this week were within the developer team, CEO Andrew Pinnington said that "we now need to re-balance our engineering structure", following a successful re-architecture.

This "re-balancing" will put more focus on "accelerating our business growth and operational delivery off the back of this platform".

Hailo, which is active in the UK, Ireland, Japan, Singapore and Spain, is currently hiring a variety of non-technical roles in London and Dublin.

The firm has seen a series of changes amongst its C-level staff, after it made a U-turn on the North American market, which it found too challenging to compete with the likes of Lyft and Uber.

Two CEOs - including co-founder Jay Bregman - subsequently left, along with several staff.

The app firm, which started out using black cabs rather than mini-cab drivers like rival Uber, claims to get passengers to their destination 35 percent faster than rivals as their drivers are versed in 'The Knowledge' - a map of routes and shortcuts committed to memory by registered black cab drivers.

New funding round

TechCrunch, who reported the news about the redundancies, also reported that Hailo is in the midst of another funding round, but the firm's spokesperson would not confirm this with Techworld.

(www.techworld.com)

Margi Murphy