Edtech unicorn Unacademy is about to launch a new app called NextLevel as it moves away from the education business to focus on products pivoting around exam tests and the Upskilling platform Relevel is moving away from the education business.
In an internal email sent to employees, Unacademy Co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal said the company will let go of 20 per cent of the team's 40 employees, while the rest will be absorbed by other businesses of the Unacademy GroupUnacademy Group.
Relevel will focus its efforts on building NextLevel, which was launched last month as a product that would disrupt LinkedIn and make resumes irrelevant.
We are very grateful for the hard work and contributions of the Relevel team. Their hard work and hustle allowed us to scale revenues quickly, but unit economics was challenging. Munjal wrote that our culture is to pursue novel and creative ideas but we are also disciplined about holding ourselves to a high bar to continue the projects we start. Business Today reviewed a copy of the internal memo. An official statement from the company is awaited.
Relevel was a hiring platform that allowed job-seekers to showcase their skills through tests. Munjal previously claimed that the platform would cross $12 million in the Annual Recurring Revenue ARR for June 2022. In October 2021, Relevel had announced that it had raised $20 million from parent Unacademy.
The affected employees will receive the same benefits that were given to employees in November, including the severance pay equivalent of notice period and additional two months, accelerated vesting, medical insurance and placement support, according to his email.
He claimed that the company's Outplacements teams helped more than 60 per cent of the exited employees get placed.
The launch of NextLevel was announced by Munjal, who said it will allow users to get a professional rating in the area they want to build a career via an interactive game play designed to test skill and knowledge.
Credentialing is broken. We still rely on random degrees and certifications to measure how good a person is for a particular skill. LinkedIn feels like a product from early 2000. Your career shouldn't depend on one or two exams you wrote years ago. He had tweeted back years ago that it was a continuous process and not a singular stamp.
In April, the company fired 1,000 employees, including hundreds of contractual educators. In early November, the company fired 350 more employees, or 10 per cent of its workforce. Munjal attributed the layoffs to the funding slowdown. Market challenges have forced us to re-evaluate our decisions. In an internal memo, he wrote that funding has slowed and a large portion of our core business has been moved offline. He said that the layoffs would be across the Unacademy GroupUnacademy Group from verticals where we have to make a difficult decision to scale down or shut down.