Unacademy lays off 600 employees amid cost-cutting exercise

Softbank backed ed-tech unicorn, Unacademy has laid off nearly 600 employees, constituting nearly 10 per cent of its employee base, top sources privy to the development told the Business Today. Sources added that those laid-off by the company mostly comprise educators/tutors and contractual employees. Unacademy has a workforce of over 6,000 employees.
 
As the company goes for cost-restructuring, sources say that the Gaurav Munjal-led firm has decided not to renew the contracts of the educators, who used to offer lessons through free access to the Unacademy app as well as subscription charges.
 
When contacted an official spokesperson of Unacademy told Business Today , “We have discussed and parted ways with the identified people, in accordance with their respective contracts. Further, the company has in good faith ensured they receive certain additional benefits and a generous severance. We value everyone’s contributions at Unacademy, and we wish all of them the best of luck and thank them for all their efforts at Unacademy.”
 
Sources further stated that the educators have been handed one to two months of severance package.

“Unacademy is built on a culture of high performance and transparency, and a key aspect of that is the transparency and objectivity with which we conduct our annual appraisal process. 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," said an official spokesperson at Unacademy.

"The vast majority of roles impacted has been a result of that process, and the efficiency we aim to drive in the broader business.,” the spokesperson added.
 
This comes on the heels of Unacademy launching its first experience centre in Delhi and Munjal announcing that the company is planning an omni-channel presence in the education sector in the test preparation and K-12 learning space.
 
“We are extremely bullish about our core test-prep business and in the growth of our Group companies Relevel, PrepLadder, and Graphy. Our test-prep business is growing over 50% YoY and our EBITDA percentage is also getting better. Relevel has witnessed unprecedented growth in the number of users and candidates placed. Currently there are over 1.8 million registered users on the Relevel platform," the company said in an e-mailed statement.

"However, the most remarkable achievement is that Relevel has delivered $2 Mn+ worth of total offers to candidates who have passed the Relevel Test. As an organization we are focussed on becoming profitable by the end of Q4 CY2022 in our core business, while investing for growth in our Group companies,” it added.
 
In August last year, Unacademy raised $440 million (about Rs 3,270.8 crore) in funding from a clutch of investors including Temasek, General Atlantic, and Softbank Vision Fund, valuing the ed-tech major at $3.44 billion.
 
Munjal recently said that the company is planning to become profitable and eyeing an IPO by next year. He, however, did not comment on the valuation for the public listing. Unacademy’s rival, Byju’s is also planning to list on stock exchanges overseas and has received over $1.5 billion funding since last year.