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Byju’s Lays Off Over 2500 Employees Across Whitehat Jr And Toppr.

Start-up unicorn in edutech in order to aggressively decrease expenses, Byju’s has laid off nearly 2,500 employees throughout its group firms. India’s thriving ed-tech company is going through its most difficult phase ever. After Unacademy and Vedantu, Byju’s, India’s largest and most successful ed-tech company, is struggling to stay afloat. During the covid-induced lockout, WhiteHat Jr stole the spotlight in order to make coding accessible to children. According to a Moneycontrol report citing sources, demand for edtech services has cooled following two years of hypergrowth.

Full-time and contract employees from Byju’s group firms, including Toppr and WhiteHat Jr., were among those thrown off. According to the article, the layoffs have occurred across sales and marketing, operations, content, and design teams.

Toppr alone has laid off approximately 1,200 staff, including 300-350 permanent personnel. Another 300 employees have been asked to resign or have been notified that they would not be paid for the next 1-1.5 months. According to the article, those laid off include approximately 600 contractual staff whose contracts were set to expire in October or November of this year.

The Moneycontrol report said,

“While on June 27 and June 28, Byju’s laid off over 1,500 employees from Toppr and WhiteHat Jr, the two companies it acquired over the last two years, on June 29, it sent out e-mails to nearly 1,000 employees from its core operations teams,”
Source: news18.com

BYJU’s denies the report, calling it misinformation

The corporation denied laying off 2500 workers. They even tampered with MoneyControl’s report. According to Byju’s spokesman, the company is optimizing teams from their group companies in order to realign the company’s business priorities and accelerate long-term growth.

Around 300-350 Toppr permanent employees were laid off, while another 300 were asked to resign or were notified that they would not be paid for around a month and a half.

In addition, 600 contract workers whose contracts were slated to expire in October or November of this year were sacked.

“There are just about 100 employees left at Toppr right now,” stated the person.

A BYJU’S representative dismissed the report’s findings, saying,

“We strongly deny the misinformation presented by Moneycontrol. To recalibrate our business priorities and accelerate our long-term growth, we are optimizing our teams from our group companies. This entire exercise involves less than 500 employees from across Byju’s Group companies.”
Source: thequint.com

This year, renowned Indian start-ups such as Unacademy, Cars24, and Vedanta laid off almost 5,000 staff. In January-March of this year, Ola let off over 2,100 people, followed by Unacademy (over 600), Cars24 (600), and Vedantu (400).

This is the most recent round of major layoffs in the education technology industry in 2022. Vedantu and Unacademy sacked over 2,500 staff earlier this year, and organizations like LIDO learning and FrontRow also laid-off workers.

Apart from that, e-commerce firm Meesho lay off 150 staff, furniture rental start-up Furlenco 200, influencer-led social commerce start-up Trell 300, and OkCredit 40.

Although start-ups are laying off staff for cost-cutting reasons, figures show that overall investment for these new-generation enterprises during January-April this year is nearly the same as last year, and the number of companies raising more than USD 100 million is also greater than last year. However, according to analysts, companies are laying off a personnel to save cash for shoring up profitability, as big-ticket funding is currently decreasing due to the ongoing unpredictable market conditions.

Leading venture capital company Sequoia Capital recently advised founders of its portfolio firms in a 51-page note that the era of being rewarded for hypergrowth at any cost is soon coming to an end, with investors gravitating toward companies that can demonstrate present profitability.

Roshni Ankola

I am a second-year student pursuing Liberal Arts from Nmims. I am a painter, I love reading and have a great interest in cooking. I am also a trained kickboxer. I’ve always had a passion for writing and hence in my free time, I work as a freelance writer.

Instructure, Best known as the publisher of Canvas providing a web-based educational solution.

We must admit that the past two years have been the toughest for the education sector. Schools and colleges being closed have raised many questions about the future of the young generation. Every government has tried to keep up with the education for schools and higher education institutions, but the best solutions came from the private sector in the form of educational software (LMS) and online websites. Companies that have been promoting online education through LMSs have come to the rescue and have helped the students to stay updated with their educational needs. Not only for the schools and other educational institutes but for the small to big companies, these LMSs have been like a boon. One of such LMS development companies includes Instructure.
Best known as the publisher of Canvas, Instructure is a thirteen years old American educational technology company. The company provides a web-based educational solution for K-12 students to students pursuing higher education as well as for corporate training.

About the Company

Instructure is an Educational Technology and Learning Management Systems provider from the US. The company headquarters is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, US, and it operates from seven different locations in the US, serving its clients from all over the world. As per the 2019 records, over 1200 people are working for Instructure, and the company made annual revenues worth $209.5 million in 2018. The Instructure educational products include Canvas, Catalog, Studio, Portfolium, MasteryConnect, Videri, CASE Benchmarks, and Item Bank, Navigate Item Bank, Academic Benchmarks, Certify, DataConnect, Program Assessment, Pathways, Canvas for Corporate Education, etc. Among all the products by Instructure, Canvas is the most popular product of the company.

The Back Story

Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley founded Instructure in 2008 when they were still at college. They were graduate students at BYU. The idea of Instructure came from the bad experience that the two co-founders had with the existing LMSs. They thought the existing ones were outdated, and no LMS developer companies were planning to upgrade them. Thus the two developed a new LMS under their newly built company, Instructure.
Josh Coates, the founder of Mozy, was the first investor the company got. He also became the first CEO of Instructure for the years 2010-2018. Instructure bagged its first big contract from Utah Education Network (UEN) in 2010, replacing Blackboard (one of the most preferred LMS of that time) in almost every college and university in the Utah area.
In 2011, the company launched officially Canvas LMS and made it available as open-source software for free. The software was also launched for iOS and Android devices. By 2013, the company reached almost 300 schools and colleges and built a customer base of 9 million users. The same year, Instructure held a Series D Funding raising $30 Million.
In 2015, Instructure came with its corporate LMS named Bridge and held a Series E funding raising $40 million. The company went public in November of the same year and started trading on New York Stock Exchange. The next year, the company was ranked number 4 on its Best Places to Work list by Glassdoor, whereas in 2018, it was ranked number 6 in the “Top Work Places” for large businesses list by Salt Lake Tribune. In March 2020, Thoma Bravo acquired Instructure for a sum of $2 billion. Thoma Bravo operates as its parent company, whereas Instructure operates as an independent company.

The Founders

Steve Daly is the current CEO of Instructure. He has a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University (BYU). Daly has also got an MBA in Strategy and Finance from the same university. He started his career as a Mechanical Designer at Glumac and Associates. Later Daly became the Director of Marketing at Intel and stayed at the company for ten years. After leaving Intel in 2002, he joined Soronti in 2003 as the CEO but then switched to Avocent Corporation to become the Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy in 2003. He has also worked as the chairman and CEO of Ivanti for ten years. In July 2002, Daly joined Instructure as its CEO.

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Vneda : One-stop Solution for All Organizational Learning Needs

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Team YTS

The market is evolving at a fast pace, and along with that, the need for skilled and well-educated employees is also increasing as everyone realizes the value of knowledge. Organizations are losing millions because they are unable to take care of their knowledge. According to a study published by the International Data Corporation (IDC), It’s estimated that poor knowledge-sharing practices cost the Fortune 500 companies a $31.5 billion annually. And therefore, organizations are looking for better options to enhance employees’ skills and knowledge, which eventually, helps them to increase their productivity. This Edu-tech startup named Vneda is one of resource providing company, which is on the mission to solve these problems by their services.

What is Vneda

Vneda is an Edu-tech startup that started on 8th March 2018. It provides a unified learning solution for skill development, knowledge management and knowledge sharing among organizations and their employees. It provides a hybrid approach for the corporate, NGOs and government organizations for the better utilization and administration of knowledge resources. Vneda allows users to manage their knowledge and enhance it through knowledge sharing with the use of smart tools.

Users can create and consume digital content such as podcasts, videos, articles, e-books, courses on the platform. They use Proprietary Algorithms for the curation and indexing of the content. Vneda helps users to manage and store their important data on a cloud-based server, and apart from this, it also provides doorstep delivery of physical books from approx 1.5 lac+ book library.

Vneda works on employee recognition as well by rewarding the users for consuming and sharing knowledge, to cultivate a habit of knowledge-sharing in them.

Co-founders

Vneda is an idea of two colleagues, Aman Sharma, and Ritesh Kumar. Aman Sharma is a Computer Science graduate who had an interest in developing something new and innovative. He developed many B2B and B2C products in the last seven years. Ritesh Kumar is an IT graduate and is a technology expert (Full Stack Developer), who likes to work on both the front end as well as the back-end of the product’s website and application.

Founding Vneda

When Aman Sharma ventured into the corporate learning market, he researched and found this market, especially in India, was relatively new and yet to be explored. There was not much focus on knowledge management and knowledge sharing. And because of this lack of focus, they were losing big monies and resources. On the contrary, this market got its due importance and was flourishing in the developed nations. From this fact, he drew his assumption that the knowledge sharing and knowledge management market would find its due recognition in India as well.

What is unique about Vneda

There is no single platform that caters to all the learning needs of an organization. They have to manage and opt for different platforms for digital learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management, corporate library, knowledge repositories, etc. Having multiple platforms leads to increased costs for the organization, it becomes problematic for employees to manage and use so many platforms. On the contrary, Venda is a single corporate learning solution that caters to a wide range of learning needs such as corporate learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management and much more.

It also helps in uniting external knowledge to internal knowledge. Vneda is providing a platform where publishers can publish their content that can be consumed by the users.

Accomplishments

It’s never been an easy task for entrepreneurs from convincing investors to invest in their ideas to users for adopting their services. Vneda was started with the seed investment of its co-founders, and since then, they are bootstrapping. Yet the hard work pays, as the company is catering to 25,000+ users across 13 corporate, like Axis Bank, Honda 2 Wheelers, Volkswagen, Orient Electric are to name a few.

How it works

Vneda works on two pricing models; one is free where a user does not pay a single penny for using the knowledge sharing and management platform. And then the other where the organization is charged a subscription fee. Under this, the organization gets a subscription to the created and curated content, which includes third party premium content and physical book delivery.

The vision

Vneda was created with a vision to construct an ecosystem of shared knowledge. The team is working to achieve a larger goal to create the knowledge management & sharing culture in all communities. But at present, they are focusing on their ideal target audience and eyeing to close 100 corporate by the end of this year and become profitable. Vneda is now a team of 10 hard working fellows putting efforts to create a strong tech product that can be integrated with any other existing system to make the knowledge access experience easy and interesting.

Team YTS

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