Indian Edtech Unacademy Fires 12% of its Employees

Indian edtech company Unacademy has fired 12% of its employees, according to an internal memo sent by CEO Gaurav Munjal to employees.

The CEO Munjal said the company took the difficult decision to ensure that "it can meet the goals it is chasing in the current realities it is facing” and "make its core business profitable."

This comes over four months after the company cut 10% (350) roles in November last year and another 1,000 full-time and contractual employees in April of the same year. With this, the firm has let go of around 1,500 to 2,000 employees in the past 12 months.

According to Techloy's layoff tracker, startups in India laid off almost 2,000 employees in March 2023 alone.

The company also hived off of its programming learning platform, CodeChef which it acquired in 2020 and plans to also shut down its K-12 learning platform Mastree.

Its major competitor Byju’s had also cut thousands of jobs last year and recently discussed shutting down its coding platform WhiteHat Jr. Other edtech unicorns including Vedantu and UpGrad are in deep loss as of the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2022.

This was largely due to a funding crunch that has impacted the edtech industry in India, and a slowdown in the unprecedented growth of online learning adoption post-pandemic.

The learning platform says it will provide a severance pay equivalent to the notice period and an additional one month’s pay to impacted employees.

The startup has also promised to give medical insurance coverage for an additional six months until September 30, and dedicated placement as well as career support to affected employees.