What’s Next For Unacademy As It Slashes 1,000 Jobs In A Massive Cost-Cutting Exercise?
Edtech startup Unacademy has laid off round 1,000 workers, together with on-roll and contractual employees, in the previous few weeks, mentioned folks with information of the event. This contains workers at Unacademy group agency Prepladder, which it acquired in 2020. The group includes Unacademy, PrepLadder, CodeChef, Graphy and Relevel.
About 600 of the employees have been requested to depart final week as the Bengaluru-based firm seems to chop prices amid an impending slowdown in enterprise funding and tightening of the general financial setting. Unacademy was valued at $3.4 billion when it raised $440 million led by Singapore’s Temasek final yr in August.
“They (Unacademy) are looking to bring down their cash burn from each cost centre and have therefore undertaken this move,” mentioned one of many folks cited above.
Of the 1,000 fired, about 300 have been educators who labored with Unacademy on a contractual foundation whereas the remainder have been in gross sales, enterprise and different capabilities.
Most of them have been working in content material gross sales and enterprise growth capabilities for the core Unacademy check preparation product. Unacademy’s whole employees depend was at 6,000, earlier than the layoffs, together with some on contract.
“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 organization of our size and scale. The company has in good faith ensured they receive certain additional benefits and a generous severance,” mentioned an Unacademy spokesperson, referring to the excessive “performance” and “transparency” that the corporate was constructing. The firm added that it was aiming to show worthwhile by the top of the present calendar yr whereas investing for development in group companies.
