Unacademy lays off 350 employees

Unacademy founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal said on Monday that the SoftBank-backed company has laid off 10% of its workforce, which translates to about 350 employees across the verticals.

This is the second round of layoffs at the edtech unicorn which fired 10% of its employees in April this year. Since then, the company has also put in several cost-cutting measures. Recently, the firm claimed that it brought its monthly burn down from $20 million to $7 million.

“Even though we realised this much earlier and took some stringent measures such as reducing our monthly burns, controlling our operational spends, limiting our marketing budgets and identifying other redundancies within the organisation, it was not enough. We need to keep optimising and building efficient systems for leaner and unprecedented times. I am deeply saddened to share that we will have to say goodbye to some of our extremely talented Unacademy employees, said Munjal in a letter to its employees.

Entrackr has a copy of the letter.

“Funding has significantly slowed down and a large portion of our core business has moved offline,” Munjal added. According to him, the impacted employees will receive severance pay equivalent to their notice period and an additional two months.

Unacademy marked its entry into offline learning earlier this year. While the impact of these exercises and initiatives will be reflected in FY23 results, the company managed to cross the Rs 700 crore revenue mark in FY22.

Unacademy’s operating revenue surged by 80.7% to Rs 719 crore in FY22 from Rs 398 crore recorded in FY21. During the period, the firm’s losses spiked over 85% to Rs 2,848 crore as compared to Rs 1,537 crore in FY21.

Edtech startups have been facing extreme times due to a funding crunch. Most funded and valued Indian startup Byju’s is also trimming costs to ensure profitability in the coming years. The company recently laid off 2,500 additional employees and as per the Morning Context report, the firm is likely to lay off over 12,000 staff in the next year.

Most recently, Hyderabad-based Practically fired a major chunk of its employees while Brainly partially shut down its India operations. Vedantu, LEAD, Eruditus, among others already laid off hundreds of employees since April whereas a clutch of them such as Udayy, Lido, Crejo.Fun and Superlearn shut their operations permanently.