Edtech firm Brainly lays off 30 India team employees amid slow growth worries

Online community learning platform Brainly, which is backed by Netherlands firm Prosus, has reportedly fired around 30 people in India. The company has laid off a major chunk of its staff globally amid economic hurdles. The company, as per reports, has fired almost the whole team in India, which had 35 people in total, who were working at the UB City office in Bengaluru. Globally, Brainly had over 860 employees till September, as per its LinkedIn profile.
 “Almost the entire India team was fired over a Google Meet (video platform) call on October 28. Each department was called separately; a total of around 30 people have been laid off. Only five people from the India team have been retained," an impacted staff was quoted in a report in Livemint.
The edtech company reportedly has a user base of more than 5.5 crore Indian students, parents and teachers, who use the platform to clear doubts and enhance learning activities. Besides India, the company has a huge base in the US, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and Latin America, among others.

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Giving details of the layoffs, an employee quoted in the report said that the job cuts have been done across departments including customer support, product, marketing, tutors and in-house academic team, legal and technical divisions. One person from each in the legal, human resources, and finance departments have been retained to finish the paperwork.
At least 50 per cent of the impacted people were women, hired barely 2-3 months ago, keeping diversity in mind. The five retained in India have been working from home and working for the last five years, the report added. 
The report stated that the company reportedly said that no region besides India has been impacted by such job cuts. "We decided to stop offering paid plans to users of Brainly.in and its entire community will use Brainly for free. This is unrelated to our global business," the company said.
One of the impacted employee said that the fired staff was hired around 2 to 5 months back. During a group meeting in the Diwali week, co-founder and global CEO Michał Borkowski said that the company has changed its strategy amid economic uncertainties and will be moving its focus back to the US as India is a very slow market. 

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The employee added that the company fax, emails, etc, were immediately cut off after the meeting, which left most of the employees in Bangalore office shocked. The employee summed up that the Indian startups had a better modus operandi and the layoff process was way smoother and better.