'Deeply saddened': Unacademy lays off 350 employees, says CEO Gaurav Munjal; severance pay, career support on offer

Unacademy founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal today announced that the SoftBank-backed startup will be laying off 10 per cent of its 'extremely talented' workforce or about 350 employees from across the verticals as the company has decided to 'either scale down or shut'. He said that the employees who will be impacted will receive a detailed communication from HR within 48 hours. 

According to new reports, Munjal sent a mail to employees in which he said that he is 'deeply saddened' to share the news. "I want to apologise to everyone sincerely since we made a commitment of no layoffs in the organisation but the market challenges have forced us to reevaluate our decisions. Funding has significantly slowed down and a large portion of our core business has moved offline," he said in the mail, adding that he takes 'complete responsibility'.

Four months ago, Munjal had told employees that Unacademy would not exercise any more layoffs.

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The CEO also said that the affected employees will get severance pay equivalent to your notice period plus an additional two months. The other benefits offered as a part of severance will include an accelerated one-year vesting period, medical insurance coverage for an additional year and dedicated placement and career support.

This comes after layoffs were reported by major companies. Recently, Twitter fired around 90 per cent of its employees in India. Days ago, Byju's founder and chief executive Byju Raveendran announced 2,500 job cuts saying that it was necessitated to avoid role duplication and reduce redundancies. In a message to employees, Raveendran said Byju has been compelled to focus on sustainability and capital-efficient growth because of adverse macroeconomic factors.

In a similar development, online community learning platform Brainly nearly fired all of its employees in India saying that the company was not "able to maintain some of the roles" focused on developing its paid plans and products.