Indian Edtech Bloodbath Continues, Unicorn LEAD Lays Off 100 Employees

The bloodbath in the edtech ecosystem continues as another edtech unicorn LEAD has laid off around 100 employees. Although the edtech startup has not shared any details on the exact number of employees it has sacked, it said that the ‘reduction in workforce’ is less than 100 employees.

“We have concluded our performance appraisal process last month and each year, we experience some churn during this time. The resulting reduction in our workforce is less than 100 persons and is majorly due to performance-related reasons,” a LEAD spokesperson said.

“LEAD’s current employee strength is around 2200 persons; and we would like to assure all our stakeholders that we are adequately staffed for our growth aspirations. With schools across India now open again, the School Edtech segment is poised for growth, and LEAD is bringing innovation and transformation back to these institutions,” the spokesperson added.

However, some media reports suggest that the lay offs at Lead have impacted over 100 employees. 

In January this year, LEAD became the first edtech unicorn of 2022 after raising $100 Mn in Series E funding round. The round was led by Westbridge Capital and GSV Ventures. At the time of fundraising, the startup said it would be hiring top talent across the country while continuing to expand its footprint across the country.

Mumbai-based LEAD was founded in 2012 by Sumeet Mehta and Smita Deorah. It enables schools to combine technology, curriculum, and pedagogy into an integrated teaching and learning system.

While investment crunch, funding winter and layoffs have been abuzz in the startup ecosystem lately, another edtech unicorn Vedantu also recently laid off around 100 employees in the month of July. Between July 4-9, Vedantu asked its full-time employees from several teams to put down their papers, Inc42 reported.

Setting in with the lull period, edtech has been one of the worst hit sectors seeing layoffs across companies including Unacademy, Toppr, WhiteHat Jr, Lido, among others. Even two of the edtech startups such as Udayy and Crejo.Fun have shut shops also.

According to Inc42’s Layoff Tracker, 11,363 employees have been laid off by 34 Indian startups so far. Moreover, edtech has seen the most layoffs, followed by consumer services and ecommerce, collectively accounting for the layoff of 9,659 employees so far.