Unacademy Ruthlessly Sacks 1000 Employees Ahead Of Business Restructuring
Last updated on April 8th, 2022 at 06:17 am
The Edtech giant Unacademy is said to have shown the door to almost 1000 of its employees in their cost cutting strategy, sources have confirmed. The company started off in 2015 as an educational platform channel on YouTube and gained more traction as the pandemic shifted educational deliverables online.
Many were not prepared and spoken about this sudden development and others seemed to have just been hired a few months back. It obviously came as a sudden shock to the (now) former employees. Those laid off includes teachers on contract (around 300 of them) as well as on-rolls employees too (including those in the fields of sales, business, and other functions).
Looking at the way the sacking has been done, it doesn’t seem like the SoftBank funded edtech is doing very well for itself. On the flipside, the Unacademy official spokesperson’s statement has been diplomatic, “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 organisation of our size and scale. The company has in good faith ensured they receive certain additional benefits and a generous severance.”
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Unacademy was valued at $3.4 billion last August when it raised $440 million led by Singapore’s Temasek.
According to a source that spoke in anonymity with a leading media house, the company is primarily looking at bringing down their cash burn from each cost centre and has therefore undertaken this move. Around 600 were asked to leave last week as the Bengaluru firm looks to cut costs amid an impending slowdown in venture funding and tightening of the economy.
The internal decision about change in business strategy could be the reason for the sudden job cuts. Unacademy is aiming to increase its focus on its core businesses; and would therefore be doing away with Mastree, a skills programme for kids, and its kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) businesses. Most employees who have been sacked over non-performance said they were given no explanation for their poor performance matrix presented to them. Those recently employed couldn’t even finish their probation period.
