This Edtech Startup Lays Off Nearly 150 Full-Time, Contractual Employees | Here’s Why

After WhiteHat Jr, Unacademy, and Vedantu, FrontRow became the latest start-up to sack its employees.

New Delhi: Bengaluru-based non-academic upskilling startup FrontRow has fired nearly 150 full-time and contractual employees, media reports said on Tuesday. The company has laid off almost 30 per cent of its workforce, owing to a fund crunch and the market downturn. After WhiteHat Jr, Unacademy, and Vedantu, FrontRow became the latest start-up to sack its employees.

“As we’ve scaled our business over the last year, we have invested heavily in growth, particularly as we’ve been creating a new category,” Founder Ishaan Preet Singh said in a statement as quoted by IANS.

Calling the lay-off a ‘difficult prioritisation decisions’, he said it was done so to achieve the goal over the next decades.

“We have over 24 months of runway to keep iterating and improving on our core business, we had to take a few difficult prioritisation decisions over the past few weeks,” he added.

Established in 2020, FrontRow offers courses like singing, music composition, cricket, photography, and film-making from influencers in these fields.

The company had last year raised $14 million led by Eight Roads Ventures, Lightspeed, Elevation Capital and several angels including Ashneer Grover, Karan Singh, and Kunal Shah.

Notably, around 6,000 start-up employees have been recently hit by layoffs In India. This includes more than a 1,000 at WhiteHat Jr and Unacademy, over 624 at Vedantu, and over 150 at Lido Learning. Ronnie Screwvala-backed Lido has also shut down operations due to lack of funds.

Apart from edtech firms, startups that have laid off employees in the past few months include social commerce platforms Trell (more than 300) and Meesho (150), used cars platform Cars24 (More than 600)A and digital health platform Mfine (More than 500) and many more.