Unacademy laid off 12% of its workforce, or more than 350 positions, in its latest round of layoffs — just over four months after cutting about 350 positions 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 to make the right decision to make our core business profitable, but it is not enough. We need to go further, we need to go deeper,” he wrote in the businessroundups.org-reviewed post.
“Today’s reality is a contrast to two years ago when we saw unprecedented growth due to the accelerated adoption of online learning. Today, the global economy is in recession, funding is scarce and running a profitable business is essential. We need to adapt to these changes, build and operate in a much leaner way so that we can really create value for our users and shareholders,” he said.
The latest move comes just days after the Bengaluru-based startup spun off programming learning platform CodeChef, which it acquired in 2020.
Unacademy, valued at $3.4 billion, cut 1,000 full-time and contract employees in April last year. The startup in June also announced a pay cut and closure of “certain businesses” to survive the funding crisis.
Edtech startups in India are struggling to attract investment and are facing challenges due to the downturn in the market. Unacademy competitor and India’s most valuable startup Byju’s also cut thousands of jobs last year and recently discussed the closure of coding platform WhiteHat Jr.
“For those of our employees affected by this decision, this is never the experience I hoped for at Unacademy. I take full responsibility for the way things turned out,” Munjal said in his message.
Unacademy, which counts Sequoia Capital India, SoftBank and Tiger Global among its top investors, will provide severance pay equal to notice and additional monthly wages for affected employees. The startup has also pledged to provide six months of additional health insurance through September 30 and dedicated placement and career support and accelerate the vesting period of their shares by one year.
Exact details on which roles will be affected by the move have not been disclosed.
