As the market hit hard for tech companies, Poland-backed edtech firm Brainly laid off half of its Indian employees following Twitter and Byjus. The company has laid off the entire Indian team which consisted of 35 members in total. The entire team was operating from Bangalore.
“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,” one of the impacted employees told the publication.
As per their LinkedIn profile, Brainly had over 860 employees till September. Reacting to emailed queries, the company stated that no province besides India was affected.
“At least 50% of the impacted people were women, hired barely 2-3 months ago, keeping diversity in mind. The five retained have been working from home and working for the last five years”, a second person added.
“Most of the fired employees were hired around 2-5 months ago. We were called on Google Meet during Diwali week. Our global CEO Michał (Borkowski) said the company has changed its strategy to move its focus back to the US and India is a very slow market. Our fax, emails, etc were cut off immediately. We were so shocked…I realize that Indian startups seem way better in handling this (layoffs),” said an impacted ex-employee, who has undergone such a firing for the second time.
Later, Brainly’s communications team answered queries to say, “Those were the roles within Brainly in a team focused on developing new paid plans. Before this information went public, we had offered departure packages to all 25 people whose roles were affected.
Earlier, social media platform Twitter also laid off several of its employees with the entry of the new CEO, Elon Musk. After that, the ed-tech company of India, Byjus as well laid off its workers due to low revenue and productivity.
“Heavily impacted by the post-Covid return of physical education, several edtech players have announced their retrenchment plans. Last month, Byju’s announced it would need to let go of around 2,500 employees accounting for 5% of its workforce over the next six months, as it aims to become profitable by March 2023.
Brainly is an education company that is being made to be utilized by students, teachers, and parents to ask and answer any questions with provided homework. It allows you to learn in a community from the whole world. Anyone who knows can answer a question. It was founded in 2009, in Krakow, Poland.
Currently, the CEO is Michal Borkowski who is also one of the founders of Brainly. The app provides doubt-clearing sessions for students, teachers, and parents. They claimed that their platform has more than 5.5 crore Indian users.
