The world’s largest peer-to-peer learning community, Brainly has laid off several employees globally including nearly 30 team members from its India team.
The five retained employees from the Indian team have been working from home and working for the last five years. However, globally the exact number of layoffs could not be commented on. The company was not “able to maintain some of the roles” due to its focus on developing its paid plans and products.
Shocking layoff at Brainly- India team (has raised more than ~$150mn)
— Corporate Chat India (@anonCorpChatInd) November 5, 2022
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One of the persons said, “Almost the entire India team was fired over a Google Meet (video platform) call on October 28. Each department was called separately; a total of around 30 people have been laid off…Only five people from the India team have been retained.”
The India team employed nearly 35 people most of them being women. Most of them were operating from the Bengaluru office. At least 50% of the impacted people were hired barely 2-3 months ago.
As per LinkedIn, The company had over 860 employees till September. Based in Kraków, Poland, with its US headquarters in New York City, Brainly is currently available in 35 countries.
The total funding from current investors, including Naspers, General Catalyst Partners, Point Nine Capital, Runa Capital and Learn Capital equals $150M. The company claimed to have a user base of more than 5.5 crore Indian students, parents, and teachers.
This is another bad news for the country’s struggling edtech sector. Recently, FrontRow, a learning platform for non-academic skills has laid off 30 employees nearly 75 percent of its workforce. Earlier, Byju’s said that is planning to lay off nearly 5 percent of the workforce, or 2,500 employees.
Ed-tech startups Unacademy, Vedantu, and Lido among others have cumulatively retrenched thousands of employees this year.
In June, WhiteHat Jr and Toppr combined laid off about 500 employees. Earlier this year, edtech unicorn Unacademy laid off more than 1,000 employees.
