unacademy lay off: Unacademy lays off around 1,000 employees as edtech major begins a massive cost-cutting exercise

Bengaluru: Edtech startup Unacademy has laid off around 1,000 employees including its on-roll staff and contractual educators in the past few weeks, multiple sources briefed on the matter said, in what is a massive downsizing underway at the SoftBank-backed startup.

Around 600 of the staff were asked to leave last week as the Bengaluru-based company looks to cut costs amid an impending slowdown in venture funding and tightening of the overall economic environment. Unacademy was valued at $3.4 billion when it
raised $440 million led by Singapore’s Temasek last year in August.

“They (Unacademy) are looking to bring down their cash burn from each cost center and have therefore undertaken this move,” one of the people mentioned above said.

According to people aware of the matter, out of the 1,000 employees who have been fired in the past few weeks, about 300 were educators on contracts, while the rest were in sales, business and other functions. Most of them were 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. The company has in good faith ensured they receive certain additional benefits and a generous severance…”

But employees cry foul

According to half a dozen affected employees that ETtech spoke to said that they were kept unaware of the entire exercise and that no feedback was given to them about bad ratings or performance.

In addition, other executives ETtech spoke to said that they were terminated within two months of hiring, before even completing their probation period of roughly two months. They added that between March 30 and March 31, the internal communication channel on Slack abruptly stopped working for some of these people. Post which, they received an email from the HR department asking them to join a link where they were told about being asked to leave the organisation. The staff ETtech spoke to said they were given an hour to accept the company’s offer of two months severance.

These employees also added that the company has not helped them with outreach to find new jobs.

“There is a lot of pressure and toxicity in the workplace. We were expected to work 12-14 hours every day and if we didn’t, we were asked to make a decision to leave…There was no warning given to us that an exercise of this scale is being undertaken. In addition, when asked the HR failed to provide any solid reasons and said that it is a management decision. Close to 15 of the 30 members were fired from my team without any reason given,” said one of the people quoted above, who did not want to be quoted as it may risk their careers going ahead.

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