Unacademy sacks 350 employees in 3rd layoffs in a year

In an internal email sent to the employees, Unacademy cofounder and chief executive Gaurab Munjal said that the company needs to keep optimizing and building efficient systems for leaner and unprecedented times. 

It is important to note that Munjal in an internal note to employees in July had promised that the company will not lay off any more employees. The CEO apologized for the u-turn from his earlier statement in the latest note. 

“I want to apologise to everyone sincerely since we made a commitment of no layoffs in the organization but the market challenges have forced us to reevaluate our decisions. Funding has significantly slowed down and a large portion of our core business has moved offline.”

 “We are no strangers to the harsh economic conditions that everyone is witnessing these days. These are very difficult times for the technology ecosystem. And things are getting worse with each passing day,” Munjal said in the email. 

 “I am deeply saddened to share that we will have to say goodbye to some of our extremely talented Unacademy employees to reduce the redundancies in our operations. These would be across the Unacademy group from verticals where we have to take a difficult decision either to scale down or shut,” Munjal added.

Impacted employees will be receiving communication within 48 hours from the human resource department, Munjal said, adding that laid-off individuals will receive severance pay equivalent to their notice period and an additional two months’ salary. 

Unacademy will also provide medical insurance coverage for an additional year as well as dedicated placement and career support. “The next few days will be about helping the members who are leaving Unacademy and I would like to request all functions and teams to support this transition,” Munjal said. 

Prior to this, Unacademy fired 150 employees in June after a performance improvement plan. Further, in April, the company let go of around 600 to 800 employees from its sales and marketing team, along with a few contractual staff and educators or tutors. 

Also, in March, Unacademy laid off over 100 employees from its PrepLadder team amid the “restructuring” of the organization. The company acquired the Chandigarh-based post-graduate medical entrance exam preparation platform PrepLadder for $50 million in 2020.

In the past few months, Indian startups operating at the junction of technology and education have sacked thousands of employees in a bid to cut costs to eventually achieve profitability as soon as possible. 

For instance, Unacademy’s rival and India’s most valuable edtech company, Byju’s, is laying off close to 2500 employees. Another edtech unicorn Vedantu has laid off more than 700 employees in 2022.