Softbank-backed Unacademy sacked about 10 per cent of its workforce, or around 350 employees on Monday citing unfavourable market conditions and due to the ongoing funding slowdown for tech startups.
Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal notified the layoffs in an internal email to employees stating that all affected employees will be given a severance pay equivalent to the notice period and an additional two months. He added that employees will also get an accelerated one year vesting period of their SOP shares. FE reviewed a copy of the email.
“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,” Munjal added. The fresh round of rationalisation at the Unacademy Group was taken due to the market challenges forcing the company to re-evaluate its decisions, Munjal added. “Funding has significantly slowed down and a large portion of our core business has moved offline,” he said.
After this round of layoffs, at least 900 of its people stand affected, including the 150 employees in June, and the 600 workers the company fired in April. Unacademy is one of many edtech unicorn — after Vedantu and Byjus — to have laid off its staff in the last few months due to a funding crunch. In the recent past, multiple edtech peers like Vedantu, Invact Metaversity, FrontRow have sacked several employees to reduce their cash burn while Lido Learning and Udayy each fired all their 100-plus staff and shut shop because their entirely online teaching models didn’t yield desired results. FE
