Edtech unicorn Unacademy, which recently launched an experience centre- Unacademy Store, has laid off nearly 600 employees, almost 10% of its workforce. The SoftBank-backed start-up employs over 6,000 people, and this firing is said to be a cost-cutting measure.
Sources familiar with the development said nearly half of the employees fired were educators, and they were clueless about this sudden move. Recently, Gaurav Munjal, Co-Founder, and CEO, of Unacademy Group said that they are on track to achieve profitability in its core business, which is its test preparation platform, in the next year.
As the company goes for cost-restructuring, sources say that the Gaurav Munjal-led firm has decided not to renew the contracts of the educators who used to offer lessons through free access to the Unacademy app as well as subscription charges.
“Unacademy is built on a culture of high performance and transparency, and a key aspect of that is the transparency and objectivity with which we conduct our annual appraisal process. Based on the outcome of several assessments, a small subset of employees, contractors, and Educators’ roles were re-evaluated due to role redundancy and performance, as is common for any organization of our size and scale,” said an official spokesperson at Unacademy.
“We are extremely bullish about our core test-prep business and in the growth of our Group companies Relevel, PrepLadder, and Graphy. Our test-prep business is growing over 50% YoY and our EBITDA percentage is also getting better. Relevel has witnessed unprecedented growth in the number of users and candidates placed. Currently, there are over 1.8 million registered users on the Relevel platform,” the company said in an e-mailed statement.
On the sudden lay-off, the spokesperson said, “Based on the outcome of several assessments, a small subset of employees, contractor, and Educator roles were re-evaluated due to role redundancy and performance, as is common for any organization of our size and scale.”
