Unacademy lays off 12% of its workforce

Edtech company Unacademy has fired 12% of its employees, according to an internal memo sent by CEO Gaurav Munjal. With this, the firm has let go of around 1,500-2,000 employees in the past 12 months.

“..We have taken every step in the right direction to make our core business profitable, yet it’s not enough. We have to go further, we have to go deeper. Unfortunately, this has led me to take another difficult decision. We will be reducing the size of our team by 12% to ensure that we can meet the goals we are chasing in the current realities we are facing,” said Munjal in a note to all employees.

Entrackr has seen a copy of the letter. 

The development comes on the heels of Unacademy hiving off of its coding platform, CodeChef.

Codechef, competitive programming platform for students and professional programmers, will be hived off from Unacademy Group and will now function as an independent business being run by its current team.

Unacademy was on an acquisition spree during the 2020-2022 period. However, the company had to reduce its workforce from the core team and its portfolio companies as a funding crunch descended.  The company also shut down its K-12 learning platform Mastree. The Unacademy Group, which comprises Graphy and PrepLadder, claims that it has a network of over 91,000 registered educators and over 99 million learners.

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

Amid rise in expenditures, Unacademy has done several cost cutting measures. In September, Munjal said that the firm is eyeing profitability by early 2023 and is also looking for an IPO in the next two years. The company recently claimed that its SaaS-based edtech platform Graphy turned operationally profitable for the month of December 2022.

Except PhysicsWallah, all edtech unicorns including Byju’s, Vedantu and upGrad are in deep loss as of fiscal year ending on March 31, 2022. While these companies are chasing profitability, it will be interesting to see their turnaround story in the coming months.