1,000 employees sacked in cost cutting exercise

New Delhi: Edtech startup Unacademy has shown the exit door to around 1,000 employees as part of its mega cost cutting exercise. Employees including on-roll staff and contractual educators have been sacked in the past few weeks, according to multiple sources.

Last week itself, the SoftBank-backed startup asked around 600 employees to leave. The Bengaluru-based company is looking to downsize amid an impending slowdown in venture funding and tightening of the overall economic environment.

The company founded in 2015 managed to make a name for itself quickly and was valued at $3.4 billion when it raised $440 million led by Singapore‘s Temasek in August 2021.

“Unacademy is looking to bring down their cash burn from each cost center and have therefore undertaken this move,” Economic Times quoted one of the people mentioned above as saying.

The break of the 1,000 sacked employees is such that about 300 were educators on contracts, while the rest were in sales, business and other functions. Most of the laid off staff was a part of the content sales and business development teams for the core Unacademy test preparation product.

In a statement sent to ETtech, an Unacademy spokesperson said that company was building a culture of high performance and transparency. “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,” it read.

However, the view amongst the employees is different. Nearly half a dozen affected employees claimed they were kept unaware of the cost cutting exercise. They shared that no feedback was given to them about bad ratings or performance.

The affected staff was given just an hour to accept the company’s offer of 2 months severance. Further, the staff said that Unacademy has not helped them with outreach to find new jobs.

One of the persons said that they were expected to work 12-14 hours every day and if they didn’t, they were asked to make a decision to leave. “There is a lot of pressure and toxicity in the workplace,” the person added.