Vedantu layoff another 100employees; marking company's third round of layoffs

Edtech unicorn Vedantu has laid off another 100 employees in a restructuring exercise, sources told, marking the company's third round of layoffs since May 2022.

According to sources, permanent employees from sales and training teams were laid off over the last month. Vedantu will be offering a two-month salary as severance to the affected employees, sources said.

In May, the company had laid off 624 employees, including permanent employees and contractual educators, accounting for over 10 percent of its workforce. The company's co-founder and CEO Vamsi Krishna had then said that he was expecting capital to be scarce in coming quarters.

Queries sent to the company remained unanswered. Inc42 first reported on the development.

With demand for online education solutions slowing post the pandemic, edtech companies in the country, including some of the largest, are struggling to survive. Many companies have thus taken aggressive cost-cutting initiatives like mass layoffs, reduction in advertising and marketing spends, cut in employee welfare costs, among others. Companies are also going slow on expansion and have reduced expenditure on non-core verticals.

So far, edtech companies have laid off close to 6,000 employees since the start of 2022. Earlier in the day, Moneycontrol had reported that SoftBank-backed Unacademy had suspended contracts of its doubt-solving educators in a cost-cutting exercise.

To be sure, edtech companies have raised millions of dollars from private market investors over the last two years at high valuations. India has seen as many as five unicorns getting minted since the start of the pandemic in 2020. Vedantu had joined the coveted club in September 2021.

Vedantu, founded in 2011 by Vamsi Krishna, Anand Prakash and Pulkit Jain, runs an online tutoring platform for K-12 (kindergarten to class 12) and IIT-JEE and NEET students.