Edtech unicorn Unacademy has announced that it will be cutting down ‘Unnecessary Expenses’ so that the company can focus on profit.
Founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal said in an employee note that for Unacademy staff there will be few changes moving forth such as Pay Cut, No Free Meals, and No Biz Class Travel. The major changes are as under:
- Meals will not be complimentary across our offices.
- The company will put strong guidelines for travel/ no business class travel for anyone including CxOs and founders/ employees and educators can pay from their own pockets if they want an upgrade.
- There will be certain privileges like dedicated drivers for CXOs will be removed.
- Founders and management will take a salary cut/founders have already taken a cut and will implement a cut for management as well.
- The company will be shutting down certain businesses that have failed to find PMF like Global Test Prep.
Edtech company Unacademy will cut unnecessary expenses to focus on profitability pic.twitter.com/kKssyOLlrW
— Harsh Upadhyay (@upadhyay_harsh1) July 11, 2022
Unacademy is having Rs 2,800 crore in its bank account. Munjal said, “Until now we never had frugality as one of our core values. But now the goal has changed. We have to do an IPO in the next two years.”
“And we have turned cash-flow positive. For that, we must embrace frugality as a core value. Even though we have more than Rs 2,800 crore in the bank, we are not efficient at all. There are a lot of unnecessary expenses that we do. We must cut all these expenses”, he added.
Earlier, Unacademy fired a small fraction of its workforce which is 150 employees (2.6% of the workforce). The workforce has been asked to leave as part of a performance improvement program (PIP). These layoffs currently affected the PrepLadder team that is based out of Chandigarh.
In April, the company laid off nearly 600 employees, contractual workers, and educators – about 10 percent of its 6,000-strong workforce across the group as the funding winter settled in.
The main aim of the company is to build the world’s largest online knowledge repository for multi-lingual education. The company uses technology to empower great educators and create a community of self-learners.
The vision is to partner with the brightest minds and democratize education for everyone looking to learn.
