upGrad's multi-million dollar fundraise and aggressive hiring plans come at a time when edtech companies in India including some of the highest-valued unicorns like Unacademy, Byju's and Vedantu are firing hundreds of employees amid a decline in demand for their services
Contenders are scrambling as the ed-tech incumbents are fumbling. But will their performance be any better?
The IGRB's order comes as a relief to Great Learning and Byju's group companies, which were under fire for mis-selling and mis-representation.
In July, UpGrad Rekrut, a subsidiary of the edtech unicorn, acquired recruitment and staffing firm Wolves India
The businesses that have come up in Kota over the past three decades provide direct and indirect livelihood to more than 200,000 people. The town is humming again after a temporary setback caused by COVID-19
Unacademy told the educators that it has made 'strategic changes' to its customised learning solutions and owing to the change, it will 'significantly' reduce doubt solving on its platform.
Jeetu Bhaiya, a character spun off by Netflix in its hit series on Kota, called Kota Factory, was inspired by Nitin Vijay. Vijay founded Motion Education, one of Kota’s most famous coaching centres, and he has a lot of advice and suggestions for IIT and medical aspirants.
The total number of IIT aspirants this year is expected to top 22 lakh. But, with only 16,000 seats available across India’s 23 IITs, competition for every seat is intense. And since Kota churns out a large number of successful IIT aspirants every year, demand for the town’s classes and teachers has jumped post the pandemic.
Rahul’s story is a microcosm of lakhs of students who flock to Kota every year, with dreams of cracking competitive examinations that will guarantee them a place in a leading engineering or medical institution.
In this special series, Moneycontrol goes to ground zero to find out how a small town in Rajasthan became one of India’s biggest education hubs.
We are open to acquiring players as long as they come at right price, bring in right value. Valuation apart, the business actually has to be real cash generating. We are not going to acquire something, which is only subscriptions without any revenue, says Mahajan.
The mis-selling complaints come at a time when the edtech decacorn is struggling to manage cash for its operations and is cutting costs aggressively as well as looking at various ways to raise funds
As rivals go for mass sackings and restructuring, Ronnie Screwvala’s upGrad plans to hire around 3,000 people to increase its workforce to around 6,500-7,000 by August
Kumar’s remarks come at a time when edtechs in India have been roiled by layoffs and funding crunch. Kumar believes upGrad is largely insulated from the storm since professionals turn to upskilling in a bleak job market.
The company has laid off over 750 employees or about 12 percent of its workforce including educators and contractual employees since the start of 2022.
Employees, including CXOs (top management) will not be provided business class treatment for travel and anyone who wants an upgrade can pay from their own pocket
Kota holds significant importance for new-age edtech companies such as Unacademy, as it has been an offline education hub, especially for engineering and medical test preparations, for decades
The delay in filing its FY21 results and pushing back of payments to Aakash come at a time when media reports have suggested that the company is struggling to manage cash for its operations and is resorting to cutting costs aggressively as well as looking at various ways to raise funds.
The delay in filing comes at a time when the company has been firing people, with reports saying that India’s biggest education company is struggling with funds
"Treating an employee with such disrespect is extremely unethical," Rajshree Dhar, a content developer with Byju's, said. Thursday is her last working day at the company.
Vedantu joins a growing list of edtech unicorns to open offline tuition cetres. SoftBank-backed Unacademy, Byju's and Physicswallah have opened offline tuition classes across the country in a bid to capitalise on rising demand for offline coaching with the pandemic situation normalising.
Byju's has laid off full-time and contractual employees from Toppr, WhiteHat Jr, and its core team across sales and marketing, operations, content and design teams
The edtech company, which got valued at over a billion dollars in September last year, reported a fourfold increase in expenses to Rs 744 crore for FY21 from Rs 186 crore a year earlier, as employee benefit expenses rose to Rs 408 crore in FY21 from Rs 88 crore in FY20
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As the pandemic recedes, competition between education companies in Kota is a lot more fierce than among the students as edtech startups look to hire teachers for their offline enterprises.