Following the Reliance-Disney India merger last year, the newly minted broadcast giant JioStar is now laying off employees in droves. The consolidated entity is slashing 1,100 jobs as part of a restructuring exercise to eliminate redundant and overlapping roles.

The layoffs, which began a month ago, are expected to continue until June at least. The retrenchments impacted teams across the board, including finance, commercial, and legal departments, and ranged from employees at the entry level to the senior director level.

To allay labour concerns, the company claims to be handing out “generous severance” packages. However, the laid off employees will still have to serve their notice period between one and three months.

Notably, while the mass layoffs do not surprise, the retrenchment could be part of Reliance’s bigger goal of cutting costs and putting the consolidated entity on the profitability path.

This comes barely four months after RIL and Walt Disney merged their Indian media assets (in November 2024), creating a broadcasting juggernaut pegged at $8.5 Bn. Understandably, a merger of such a size has its ripple effects, which are now being felt.

As the newly formed entity finds a way to stabilise itself going ahead, here is our quick update on JioHostar putting 1K+ jobs on the chopping block.

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While business functions such as customer servicing and sales have been enjoying the benefits of GenAI automation, the human resource space has still been bereft of it. To solve this, long-time friends Avinash Singh, Rajiv Ranjan, and Saurabh Sisodia founded Northtstarz.ai in 2022.

With the help of its in-house small language model trained on over 40,000 real-life interviews, the startup helps enterprises up their hiring game and find the right talent.

The Bengaluru-based startup counts Mahindra Logistics, The Good Glamm Group and The Media Ant as its clients.

The startup has raised $250K in funding to date and plans to onboard 40-50 customers over the next six months. After achieving this goal, it plans to raise a larger round and build its Agentic AI technology.

In a space where innovation is moving at a breakneck speed, sustaining its technological edge and proving strong revenue traction will be critical for Northtstarz.ai as it forges itself to make a deeper dent in the global HR tech industry.

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