Over 2,500 employees laid off across Byju's, Whitehat Junior and Toppr

Byju's has laid off full-time and contractual employees from Toppr, WhiteHat Jr, and its core team across sales and marketing, operations, content and design teams as per sources.

While on June 27 and June 28, Byju's laid off over 1,500 employees from Toppr and WhiteHat Jr, the two companies it acquired over the last two years, on June 29, it sent out e-mails to nearly 1,000 employees from its core operations teams, the sources said.

"Employees from content and design team were the most affected ones," said a source requesting anonymity.

"They have reduced content, solution-writing and design teams drastically across group companies. Some of these teams have even been reduced to zero. Earlier they were laying off employees from the companies they acquired so that their name doesn't come directly, but now they have laid off employees from its core operations," the source added.

Byju's has laid off about 1,200 employees from Toppr alone. Sources said that about 300-350 permanent employees from Toppr were laid off, while another 300 employees were asked to tender their resignations, or were told that they will not get salaries for about 1-1.5 months. Moreover, about 600 contractual employees were laid off, whose tenures were scheduled to end around October or November, this year, sources said.

"Top administration cited cost-cutting and redundancy in roles as the reason behind the layoffs," a source said.

"Byju's is also looking to integrate Toppr's operations with itself. So, for obvious reasons, other than educators, many roles will become redundant. Only about 100 employees are left at Toppr right now," the source added.

"Byju's has completed the integration of Toppr and has absorbed almost 80 percent of its talented workforce into the Byju's ecosystem. As the next step, we are optimising teams to recalibrate business priorities and accelerate our long-term growth," said a spokesperson for Byju's.

Byju's move of laying off thousands of employees comes at a time when startups, especially edtech startups are aggressively looking to cut costs amid a funding slowdown and schools, colleges and tuition centers reopening.

Byju's had raised a whopping $800 million earlier this year at a valuation of $22 billion. The company was also reportedly in talks to raise overseas acquisition financing of as much as $1 billion.

In a recent interview, Raveendran said that the company will look to make multi-billion-dollar acquisitions in the US and elsewhere and is hence accessing all kinds of capital. However, earlier this week, news agency The Morning Context had reported that Byju's is yet to pay millions of dollars to the shareholders of Aakash Educational Services, a test-preparation company, which Byju's acquired fully in 2021 for $1 billion.