Indian edtech Unacademy slashes another 12% jobs

Unacademy has laid off 12% of its workforce, or over 350 roles, in its latest round of layoffs — just over four months after cutting about 350 roles in November.

Unacademy co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal announced the new layoff decision in a Slack post to employees.

“We have taken every step in the right decision to make our core business profitable, yet it’s not enough. We have to go further, we have to go deeper,” he wrote in the message reviewed by TechCrunch.

“Today’s reality is a contrast from two years ago where we saw unprecedented growth because of accelerated adoption of online learning. Today, the global economy is enduring a recession, funding is scare and running a profitable business is key. We have to adapt to these changes, build and operate in a much leaner manner so we can truly create value for our users and shareholders,” he said.

The latest move comes just days after the Bengaluru-based startup hived off programming learning platform CodeChef, which it acquired in 2020.

Unacademy, valued at $3.4 billion, cut 1,000 full-time and contractual employees in April last year. The startup in June also announced a pay cut and shut down of “certain businesses” to survive the funding crunch.

Edtech startups in India are struggling to attract investments and facing challenges due to the market downturn. Unacademy competitor and India’s most valuable startup Byju’s also cut thousands of jobs last year and recently discussed shutting down coding platform WhiteHat Jr.

“To those of our employees impacted by this decision, this is never the experience I hoped you would have had at Unacademy. I take complete responsibility for the way things have turned out,” Munjal said in his message.

Unacademy, which counts Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank and Tiger Global among its key investors, will provide a severance pay equivalent of notice period and an additional one month’s pay to impacted employees. The startup has also promised to give medical insurance coverage for additional six months until September 30 and dedicated placement as well as career support and accelerate the vesting period of their stock by one year.

Exact details on which roles are affected by the move were not disclosed.