Educational start-up company, Unacademy were forced to lay off around a thousand employees as they go through a cost cutting procedure to stay afloat. According to various sources, employees of lines from the accounting section, to the contracted educators and other staff members were booted out of the company over the past month.
Softbank, Unacademy’s primary investors were forced to kick six hundred of their employees out of the company. The company that is based in the silicone valley of India, Bangalore has been backed into a corner due to low inflow of funding, many entrants into the online education field such as Byjus, and the overall environment around the world due to the Russia-Ukraine crisis and rising oil prices.
The start-up founded seven years ago back in 2015 was able to rise to the summit of their industry at a rapid pace and got itself a valuation at $3.4 billion USD after it was able to secure funds worth $440 million USD from Singaporean venture capitalist firm – Temasek.
According to many sources, the firm has been burning too much cash in recent times and has now pressed the brakes on the outflow of cash assets to steady the company for now.
Out of the thousand people who have been shown the door, about a third of them were educators of various subjects who were contracted with the company. The remaining are sprinkled across various lines of work under Unacademy such as sales and business development.
A representative of the company came out to say that Unacademy fosters and develops a mindset of hard performances and full transparency. The company had done several studies and comprehensive reports and after evaluating the roles of many employees including contractors and other employees, some of them had to be sacked due to redundancy. He continued and stated that massive lay offs are quite common for any company that is expanding and looking to spend their money in the most effective way possible.
However, the main issue is that most of the employees, especially the lower-level ones and all of the contractors had said that they had no idea that they employers were looking at cost cutting measures and it came as a shock to them when they were suddenly told to leave the company, they had devoted so much time and effort to.
One of the employees who was shown the sack said that he worked about 60-80 hours a week and described their workplace as unappreciative and toxic.