After a performance improvement plan, Unacademy fired 150 employees in June. The edtech company sacked 1,000 contractual and full-time workers in April too. 300 educators were laid off, with the rest from business, sales, and other fields.
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Gaurav Munjal, the cofounder of Unacademy and chief executive officer (CEO), cited the need to decrease costs in light of the current challenging economic conditions as the reason behind the layoffs in an internal email that was issued to all of the employees of the company.
The edtech unicorn Unacademy, founded in 2015, and backed by SoftBank, has laid off 10% of its staff, or roughly 350 people in its third round of layoffs within a year.
In addition, in March, Unacademy “restructured” its operations by terminating the employment of more than one hundred people who worked on its PrepLadder team. In the year 2020, the business shelled out $50 million to purchase the post-graduate medical entrance test preparation platform known as PrepLadder, which was situated in Chandigarh.
What Unacademy Group co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal stated
In an internal mail sent to employees, he said that “I am deeply saddened to share that we will have to say goodbye to some of our extremely talented Unacademy employees to reduce the redundancies in our operations. These would be across the Unacademy Group from verticals where we have to take a difficult decision either to scale down or shut,”
It is important to point out that Munjal had promised in July, not to terminate the employment of any further staff members. On the other hand, he has since issued an apology for the change of his mind.
According to the email, the company had anticipated the slowdown and taken steps like cutting monthly expenditures, managing operating expenses, limiting marketing expenditures, and finding extra backups, but those efforts had failed.
He said, “I want to apologize to everyone sincerely since we made a commitment of no layoffs in the organization but the market challenges have forced us to reevaluate our decisions. Funding has significantly slowed down,”
Job cuts on other platforms including Unacademy
The Chief Executive Officer of Unacademy tweeted on November 4, that the company had reduced its monthly burn rate from $20 million to $7 million.
Indian start-up companies have laid off thousands of employees over the course of the last several months in an effort to reduce costs. Byju’s, Unacademy’s primary competitor in India and the most valuable edtech business in the country, has also just lately laid off close to 2500 employees.
More than 700 people were laid off by Vedantu, another edtech company, in the year 2022.
Laid-off employees are to receive severance pay
Munjal stated that the employees who were being laid off will get severance compensation comparable to their notice term and an additional two months’ salary.
Unacademy will also give a year of medical insurance and placement and career support.
Munjal also further added that in the coming days, they will be focusing on assisting the members of Unacademy who are leaving. He would want to make a request to all of the sections and teams to assist with this changeover, he said.
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