mumbai increased demand for technology talent following an accelerated focus on digital adoption by businesses due to the covid19 pandemic is making hiring expensive especially for earlystage startups multiple founders and recruiters told etengineers data analysts developers and product managers in the threetosevenyear experience bracket are often being hired for up to 50 higher salaries than industry levels by startups flush with investor capitalfounders and investors say the current hiring bubble is reminiscent of 20142015 when the funding boom inflated salariesthe first time for the indian startup ecosystemon the back of massive funding that the likes of homegrown ecommerce company flipkart received advt at the onset of the covid19 pandemic companies had to retrench staff but as the wheels of the economy picked up pace and the adoption of technology accelerated funds flowed into startups in the fintech software as a service saas edtech space and for platforms enabling small and mediumsized businesses to go digitalthis led earlystage startups to hire at increased salaries compared to prepandemic levels the industry insiders saidyap a banking and paymentsfocussed infrastructure provider which recently closed a 10 million series b round has grown from 70 employees in march last year to over 200 now said cofounder madhusudanan r as they continue to hire for tech roles he said companies are willing to pay 7080 more to retain core talentthe hiring boom will lead to the same issue that happened in 2015 when salaries were inflated at junior levelsit becomes unsustainable which leads to companies not getting profitable anytime soon said ashish dave chief executive officer of mirae asset venture investments which has deployed over 200 million in india across companies like ola zomato and bigbasket over the last two yearsthe logic this time is i did not get a hike last year because of covid19 this year i should get a double increment said mandeep manocha cofounder and ceo of cashify an online reseller of mobile phones and other gadgets that recently raised 15 million in series d funding and began rehiring in september when business activity normalised advt graphic rahul awasthiettechearlystage funding boomdemand for top tech talent increased multifold as average deal sizes across sectors rose substantially in the past eight months funding rounds are closing in record time and startups are raising more capital than planned et reported on march 18in the first three months of this year seedstage rounds averaged 11 million while series a rounds have averaged at 51 million across 32 financing rounds according to data till march 2 by tracxn a research platform that tracks data for privately held companiesdeepak abbot founder of gold monetisation platform indiagold said the slug of capital comes with an expectation to grow faster which requires quality talentthe problem is for startups in the middle where you suddenly become big too fast the money has to go into hiring when startups want to quickly hire multiple engineers thats where the trouble begins abbot saidin general engineering and tech talent used to ask