Unacademy fires 600 employees to cut costs : Rashtra News
#Unacademy #fires #employees #cut #costs
Edtech start-up Unacademy has laid off close to 600 employees, full-time as well as contractual, over the past two months in a cost-optimisation drive, sources aware of the development said.
The majority of the layoffs were initiated due to redundancy in roles as the company expands into new edtech categories and products, the sources added.
The edtech unicorn currently employs more than 6,000 full-time and contractual workers, including from start-ups it acquired in the past few quarters. Less than 10% of the workforce has been impacted by the layoffs, a company statement said on Thursday.
Till date, Unacademy has made close to 11 acquisitions, mostly in the test-prep space. Some of its prominent start-up acquisitions include names such as TapChief, Mastree, PrepLadder, HandaKaFunda, and others. Its costliest acquisition to date is PrepLadder, for which the edtech firm paid $50 million on July 2020.
gThe educators who were asked to leave were notified about the layoffs in advance. We constantly keep a rigorous check on our content created by educators, and there are also performance metrics that we keep track of. In an instance where an educator doesn’t meet our performance check, we first provide some time to improve, but eventually, we let go of some of them. However, we keep hiring new educators for these positions,” one of the sources said.
Founded in 2015 by Gaurav Munjal, Hemesh Singh, Roman Saini, and Sachin Gupta, the edtech start-up initially operated as a test-prep product offering free classes for K-12 students and other competitive exams. Later in 2019, Unacademy launched a subscription to some of its content, and also venture into live tuition classes.
A company statement issued on Thursday said its core test-prep business is growing over 50% year-on-year, and that the start-up has been working on turning profitable by the end of Q4CY2022 in its core business.
“Based on the outcome of several assessments, a small subset of employee, contractor, and educator roles were re-evaluated due to role redundancy and performance, as is common for any organisation of our size and scale. The vast majority of roles impacted has been a result of that process, and the efficiency we aim to drive in the broader business. We have discussed and parted ways with the identified people, in accordance with their respective contracts. Further, the company has in good faith ensured they receive certain additional benefits and a generous severance,” the company statement added.
The edtech start-up has raised close to $800 million in funding to date, including from prominent investors like Facebook, Tiger Global, Temasek Holdings, SoftBank, Blume Ventures, Sequoia, Nexus Venture Partners, Elevation Capital and others. The start-up is currently valued at $3.4 billion. Unacademy competes closely with its arch-rival Byju’s, which has also made strides in the Indian edtech segment. Currently, Byju’s is the most valued start-up in India at $22 billion in its recent funding round in March 2022.
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( News Source :Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Rashtra News staff and is published from a www.financialexpress.com feed.)
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