According to a memo sent internally by CEO Gaurav Munjal, the edtech company Unacademy has let go 12% of its staff. As a result, the company laid off between 1,500 and 2,000 workers in the previous 12 months.
“We have taken every step in the right direction to make our core business profitable, yet it’s not enough. We have to go further; we have to go deeper. Unfortunately, this has led me to take another difficult decision. We will be reducing the size of our team by 12% to ensure that we can meet the goals we are chasing in the current realities we are facing,” said Munjal in a note to all employees.
The change follows Unacademy’s decision to spin off its coding platform, CodeChef.
Codechef, a platform for professional and amateur programmers to compete in programming challenges, will be split off from Unacademy Group and run independently by its current staff.
In the years 2020–2022, Unacademy went on an acquisition binge. However, as a funding crunch set in, the company was forced to cut back on both its core team and the workforce at its portfolio companies. Additionally, Mastree, the company’s K–12 learning platform, was shut down. Graphy and PrepLadder are part of The Unacademy Group, which claims to have a network of over 91,000 registered educators and over 99 million students.
Operating revenue for the company increased by 80.7% to Rs 719 crore in FY22 from Rs 398 crore in FY21. The company’s losses increased significantly by over 85% to Rs 2,848 crore in FY22 from Rs 1,537 crore in FY21.
Unacademy has implemented a number of cost-cutting measures in response to rising expenses. Its goal is to become profitable by the beginning of 2023, and Munjal stated in September that an IPO is being considered for the next two years. The business recently asserted that for the month of December 2022, the SaaS-based edtech platform Graphy achieved operational profitability.
As of the fiscal year that ends on March 31, 2022, all edtech unicorns—aside from PhysicsWallah—are suffering severe losses, including Byju’s, Vedantu, and upGrad. It will be intriguing to follow these businesses’ turnaround stories in the coming months as they pursue profitability.
