Edtech Start-up FrontRow Lays Off 75% Of Its Workforce

The lay-off saga in the edtech sector continues as a day after Byju’s announced the termination of 2,500 employees, another start-up FrontRow terminated 130 employees.

The edtech platform has reportedly terminated the contracts of 75 per cent of its employees. The company has fired 130 workers and is now left with only 40 employees. 

This is the largest layoff by the company. Earlier, in May, the Bengaluru-based start-up laid off close to 145 full-time and contractual employees. 

Started in 2012, the firm drew investments in millions of dollars from Deepika Padukone, Elevation Capital, and Lightspeed. 

“Unfortunately, over the past couple of months, it’s also become clear that the business fundamentals were still not working despite our best efforts,” FrontRow co-founder Ishaan Preet Singh said in a statement. 

“[A]s we realized that a sales and marketing led approach to this market didn’t work with our current delivery model, we had to let go a large part of our team,” he added.

The start-up, founded by Mikhail Raj, Shubhadit Sharma, and Ishan Preet Singh, had raised $14 million in September 2021 from Eight Road Ventures, GSV, Lightspeed, and Elevation Capital. 

“Google has less work but more people”, the statement by the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai, triggered the fear of ‘pink slips’ among the billions of corporate workers across the world. The back-to-back layoffs by Amazon, Walmart, and Microsoft have not only strengthened the anxiety but also raised a pertinent question, ‘Are the days of golden handshakes ticking the clock around?’

The question of job losses and unemployment has reached India as well. In September 2022, Wipro, one of the famous IT companies from the big four, laid-off 300 employees for ‘moonlighting’. 

Startups such as Unacademy, Meesho, and Vedantu have also fired a part of their workforce previously.