Unacademy fires 40 employees in subsidiary Relevel; to build LinkedIn competitor NextLevel

Edtech unicorn Unacademy is conducting another round of layoffs as its upskilling platform Relevel is moving away from education business to focus on products pivoting around exam tests and the newly launched app called NextLevel. 

In an internal email to employees, Unacademy Co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal said the company will let go of 20 per cent (around 40 people) of Relevel’s team while the rest of them will be absorbed by other businesses of Unacademy Group. 

The core team of Relevel will focus 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 proved challenging. 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,” Munjal wrote. Business Today has reviewed a copy of this internal memo. An official statement from the company is awaited. 

Relevel was a hiring platform that enabled job-seekers to showcase their skills through tests. Munjal had previously claimed the platform was set to cross $12 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for June 2022. In October 2021, Relevel had announced that it raised $20 Million from parent Unacademy. 

The affected employees will receive the same benefits that were given to exiting employees in November including severance pay equivalent of notice period and an additional two months, accelerated vesting, medical insurance and placement support, his email said. 

He also claimed that the company’s Outplacements teams helped more than 60 per cent of the exited employees get placed. 

Announcing the launch of NextLevel, Munjal had said it will allow users get 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 someone is for a particular Skill. And LinkedIn feels like a Product from early 2000. It’s time to change all of this. Your Career shouldn’t be dependent on one or two exams that you wrote years back. You can keep learning and keep improving your Rating. It’s a continuous process and not a singular stamp that you got years ago,” he had tweeted. 

Having reportedly fired 1,000 employees in April (including hundreds of contractual educators), the company dismissed 350 more employees (10 per cent of its workforce) in early November. Munjal attributed the layoffs to the funding slowdown. “Market challenges have forced us to re-evaluate our decisions. Funding has significantly slowed down and a large portion of our core business has moved offline,” he wrote in an internal memo. The layoffs “would be across the Unacademy Group from verticals where we have to take a difficult decision either to scale down or shut down,” he said. 

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