Chennai-based, Edtech Startup Skill-Lync which provides job opportunities to students upon completion of the program, lays off over 400 employees due to a funding crunch.
Currently, the Edtech firm has over 2,000 employees as per its LinkedIn page.
Surya Narayanan Paneer Selvam, Co-Founder of the company sent an internal mail to the employees about the layoffs. He said that these layoffs don’t reflect in any way on the performance of the individual.
The employees who are impacted are from sales, marketing, pre-sales, tech, and talent acquisition teams. The company offered severance packages to the laid-off employees based on their respective notice periods.
According to Inc 42, Skill-Lync has also closed its Delhi NCR office post the latest layoff round. Earlier, it had closed its Mumbai and Pune offices and let go of around 300-400 employees.
The startup said in a statement to Inc 42 “Given the macroeconomic conditions, we’ve decided to moderate our growth expectations and slow down some of our projects focused on the future. In the existing business, we have changed our delivery model to provide better learning outcomes using a combination of technology and experts – This led to some role redundancy,”
“We’ve decided to consolidate our operations across Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, with only corporate-facing teams operating from Pune/Delhi which further led to some headcount reduction. We’ve also reduced the hierarchy in our organization for more agile decision-making and accountability,” he added.
Skill-Lync, founded in 2015 by PaneerSelvam and Sarangarajan V, directly competes against the likes of Great Learning, Info Edge-backed Coding Ninjas, Hero Vired, Pesto Tech, and Scaler Academy. The Edutech firm acquired the online learning platform Crio for an undisclosed amount in November 2022.
Recently, other Edtech companies like Byju’s, Unacademy, Vendatu, etc. have also laid off their employees.
According to trueup, So far in 2023, there have been 812 layoffs at tech companies with 237,887 people impacted (2,124 people per day). In 2022, there were 1,557 layoffs at tech companies and 243,318 people were impacted (667 people per day).
