BYJU’S Sees Hundreds Of Employees Exit Through PIP After 2,500 Layoffs

Three months after BYJU’S announced that it would be firing around 2,500 employees to cut costs and turn profitable, the edtech decacorn has cut hundreds of more jobs citing poor performance of the employees.

While the number of employees impacted by this is unclear, media reports pinned the number at 900-1,000.

Sources told Inc42 that the fresh exits are mostly related to the performance of the employees. The company fired employees from the engineering and product teams, according to the LinkedIn posts of the impacted employees.

The sources cited above said that the company had put hundreds of employees on a performance improvement plan (PIP), and they were later asked to put in their papers. Employees also said that the edtech decacorn offered an additional salary of one month to employees resigning on their own.

Many of the posts on social media alleged that this was the second round of layoffs at the edtech startup.

BYJU’S did not respond to Inc42’s questions on the issue. The story would be updated on receiving a response from the startup.

However, sources close to the top management told Inc42 that the exits were part of the 2,500 layoffs announced by BYJU’S in October.

The development comes weeks after the edtech’s cofounder Byju Raveendran wrote a letter to his employees stating the company’s intent to become profitable in 2023.

“While we were expecting this third phase to begin in 2024, the macroeconomic changes of 2022 meant that we had to embark on the path to profitability this year itself. ‘Growth with efficiency’ became our theme for this year. This did not mean investing less, but investing better and prioritising more rigorously,” Raveendran said in the letter.

On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, the cofounder told Moneycontrol in an interview that the worst was over for BYJU’S, adding that it would turn profitable at a company level by the March or the June quarter. 

He also told the publication that the edtech startup was looking to cut marketing costs and would not renew sponsorship deals with the likes of FIFA, BCCI and ICC.

It must be noted that BYJU’S and its subsidiaries Toppr and WhiteHat Jr have laid off over 4,000 employees since 2022. 

BYJU’S reported a loss of INR 4,588.75 Cr in FY21, up 19.8X from INR 231.69 Cr in FY20. It is yet to file the financial statement for FY22.