At the firm’s virtual town hall co-founder and chief executive officer Gaurav Munjal said that employees of edtech unicorn Unacademy will not receive appraisal in 2024.
“I think 2023 was an average year for us. But 2024, if not great, was above average. But we did not hit our growth goals. The good part is that the burn is extremely low now, and we have a huge runway. And I kept saying that we don’t have a survival risk,” said Munjal in the town hall.
According to Munjal, the company won’t be able to do any appraisals this year as it didn’t hit the projected growth numbers. “I know I said that we will do appraisals two, three weeks ago, but when we started the process, we realized that we made a mistake,” he said in the town hall.
He also mentioned that “We are the ones who are still standing while our competitors are going down one by one”.
The development comes soon after the company laid off 250 employees to enhance efficiency. As per a news report, last month the SoftBank-backed company was in early talks to merge with k12 Techno which runs the chain of Orchids International Schools.
In August 2021, Unacademy raised its last equity round of $440 million at a valuation of $3.44 billion after that the firm went through major layoffs, shutting down acquired verticals and exits of key employees including co-founder and CTO Hemesh Singh. However, it has launched many offline centers across the nation. Recently the firm has entered into the language learning segment with a new app.
In the beginning of FY24, the company claimed that it was still close to achieve profitability at the group level. While the company is yet to file the audited annual report for the last fiscal year (FY24), it recorded a 26% increase in its operating revenue to Rs 907 crore in FY23 while controlling losses by nearly 40% to Rs 1,004 crore.
Currently, Edtech companies are going through a hard time whether it is Byju’s or any other growth stage startups. As per data collected, ed-tech companies managed to raise only $138 million across 21 deals during the first half of 2024, where in 2023, ed-tech startups raised $456 million, and in 2022 and 2021 the ed-tech startup saw $2.3 billion and $5.8 billion deployment in the industry, respectively.
