In April,
Unacademy fired around 1,000 employees across the group as part of cost-cutting measures. Of these, about 300 were educators who worked with Unacademy on contract while the rest were in sales, business and other functions.
“We will continue to drive efficiency by reducing unnecessary expenses…we will not be doing any layoffs moving forth,” Munjal said.
The startup will, however, move some team members from its online business to its offline centres and the core engineering department.
“I still urge the teams to be extremely mindful about expenses and proactively take measures to become more efficient,” Munjal wrote.
This comes just a day after
Munjal told employees in another internal note that the edtech firm’s founders and top management will take pay cuts and that the company would shut its global test preparation business.
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Munjal said the steps were aimed at reducing costs significantly and hitting profitability, even as the SoftBank-backed company has Rs 2,800 crore in the bank.
“We spend crores on travel for employees and educators. Sometimes it’s needed, sometimes it’s not. There are a lot of unnecessary expenses that we do. We must cut all these expenses,” he wrote in the note. “We have a strong core business. We must turn profitable asap (as soon as possible).”
According to the note, meals and snacks will no longer be complimentary across its offices and it will put “strong guidelines” for travel, including no ‘business class’ travel for anyone including its senior-most executives.
Founders, employees and educators can pay from their own pocket if they want an upgrade, he said, adding that certain privileges like dedicated drivers for CXOs will be removed as well.
As growth slows down for Indian edtechs, several startups in the space have laid off workers to conserve cash and extend their runways.
Lido Learning and
Vedantu have also laid off employees this year.
Byju’s has also laid off at least 600 employees – 300 from its test preparation subsidiary Toppr and another 300 at children’s coding platform WhiteHat Jr.
To combat the rising demand for offline classes,
Unacademy opened its first offline test prep centres in Kota Rajasthan in June.
Peers like Byju’s, Vedantu and PhysicsWallah have also forayed offline or adopted hybrid learning models.
