Lightspeed-backed edtech startup Teachmint has laid off 70 more employees in the second round of layoffs in six months as the company looks to reduce costs amid a worsening funding winter.
Mihir Gupta, co-founder and CEO of the company informed about the layoffs in a town hall on May 4, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told Moneycontrol. Gupta told employees that the company had to cut jobs purely because of role redundancies and it was not performance-based, the person said.
The company, which offers a classroom management platform, confirmed the development but did not comment on the number of affected employees officially. News portal Inc42 first reported the development.
“Some roles have been unfortunately impacted as we work on increasing structural efficiencies in our operations. We have proactively communicated to the impacted colleagues and are working on providing them comprehensive support,” a spokesperson for Teachmint said.
According to the company, the laid-off employees will be getting three months of payroll support, six months of continued health insurance benefits, for individuals and families, and continued access to mental health counselors for individuals and families. The company will also be providing outplacement support and the vesting of ESOPs (employee stock option plan) would be accelerated for eligible employees, the company said.
With the latest round of layoffs, Teachmint has now sacked more than 110 employees since December last year. It had then laid off 45 employees. The company has joined other edtech startups like Unacademy, Vedantu and Byju's to undertake multiple rounds of layoffs.
Founded in 2020 by Gupta, Payoj Jain, Divyansh Barodia, and Anshuman Kumar, Teachmint is a mobile-first, video-first, teaching platform that helps in digitisation of classrooms. The startup has raised $118 million to date, from global venture capital firms including Rocketship.VC, Vulcan, Better Capital among others besides Lightspeed Venture Partners. It was last valued at $500 million.
Moneycontrol reported in March how the company earned just Rs 80 lakhs from operations in FY22 (2021-22), which was its first full year of operations. The company reported a loss of Rs 131.7 crore for FY22.
Teachmint was on an acquisition spree in 2021 and had acquired four companies to expand rapidly. Between December 2021 and January 2022, Teachmint acquired four companies including MyClassCampus, Teachmore, Teachee's India team and Airlearn to expand and diversify rapidly at undisclosed deal amounts.
In November 2021, the Lightspeed-backed edtech startup rolled out a unique ESOP to retain people as the job market for startups was hot back then. The ESOP plan, which the company named as ‘Continuous Liquidity Plan’ gave employees an option to sell their stock options whenever they wanted as long as their shares were vested, rather than when the company raises money, when investors decide to buy back or when the founders decide- as is generally the norm.
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