Byju’s sacks 1,000 employees in another round of mass layoff

Byju’s has laid off more than 1,000 employees in a new round of layoff at the only edtech decacorn, according to three sources aware of details. This is the second round of layoffs in the past 6 months.

“Byju’s has laid off 1000 employees across sales, marketing and communications and engineering departments,” said one of the sources requesting anonymity. “Rather than letting them go, the company asked most of the impacted employees to resign abruptly.”

While Byju’s spokesperson has declined to comment on the story, laid off employees took to LinkedIn and Twitter to highlight the issue. YourStory was the first to report this development.

In October 2022, Byju’s announced that it’s laying off 5% of its workforce, affecting nearly 2,500 people. The company then said the move was aimed at optimizing the spending and operational cost.

Following the move then, Byju's founder and CEO Byju Raveendran sent an email to employees saying, “I am truly sorry to those who will have to leave BYJU'S. You are not just a name to me. You are not a number. You are not just five percent of my company. You are five percent of me.”

While the pandemic came as a tailwind for edtech companies like Byju’s in India, the reopening of schools and coaching centers and funding winter amid the global slowdown turned out to be a double whammy for the startups in this sector.

Byju’s detailed annual financial statement for the fiscal year ending March 2021 with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) revealed that its revenue from operations grew a mere 4% to Rs 2280 crore in FY21 from Rs 2,189 crore in the previous fiscal year (FY20). However, the company’s losses ballooned 14.9X to Rs 4,564 crore during the same period.

With the ‘funding winter’ prolonging, Byju’s and several other startups have now begun talking about profitability and long-term sustenance. The cost-cutting measures, however, have affected thousands of employees at these startups.

Data compiled by Fintrackr shows that more than 25 startups went through layoffs in January and over 3,000 employees have been impacted in the process. As per The Morning Context report, Byju’s is in the process of giving pink slips to up to 5,000 employees. In 2022, more than 20,000 employees were laid off which also includes contract employees at companies such as Ola, and Blinkit. It’s worth highlighting that edtech accounted for nearly 50% of the total firings during the last year.