Unacademy lays off 600 employees from sales, business and other functions

• Unacademy has laid off 600 employees over the last few weeks.
• The step was reportedly taken to reduce the company’s cash burn and strengthen finances.
• Unacademy said that the layoffs were an outcome of several assessments.

Edtech firm Unacademy has laid off as many as 600 employees over the last few weeks as it looks to turn profitable by the end of this year, the company confirmed on April 7. The company noted that this makes up only 10% of its total workforce of 6,000.

The development comes after Economic Times, citing undisclosed sources, reported the edtech giant has laid off 1000 on-roll employees and contractual educatures in this trimming to strengthen its financial situation and reduce the cash burn from each cost centers.

Those impacted include 300 educators on contract and 600 employees from several vertices like sales, business and other functions. Most of these were reportedly part of the content sales and business development teams for the core Unacademy test preparation product.

A spokesperson of Unacademy, in a media statement, noted that the company is looking to build a culture of high performance and the layoffs were an outcome of several assessments.

However, affected employees have reportedly mentioned that they were not aware of any such assessment and no flags were raised about their alleged poor ratings or performance.

“Based on the outcome of several assessments, a small subset of employee, contractor, and educator roles were reevaluated due to role redundancy and performance, as is common for any organisation of our size and scale. The company has in good faith ensured they receive certain additional benefits and a generous severance…," Unacademy said.

The organisation further added, “...We are focussed on becoming profitable by the end of Q4 CY2022 in our core business [test preparation], while investing for growth in our Group companies.”

Unacademy is one of the highest valued edtech companies in India, second only to Byju’s. The company has raised over $800 million till date from marquee investors like Zomato’s Deepinder Goyal, Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal, Tiger Global, Mirae Asset, General Atlantic and others. The company was valued at $3.4 billion in August 2021.

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