FrontRow, an education technology firm, has laid off nearly 150 full-time and contractual employees in order to cut expenses.
The Bengaluru-based non-academic upskilling startup fired almost 30 percent of its workforce, owing to fund crunch and the market downturn.
Online learning portals such as WhiteHat Jr, Unacademy, and Vedantu have also sacked its employees in the wake of tough market conditions.
“As we’ve scaled our business over the last year, we have invested in growth, particularly as we’ve been creating a new category,” FrontRow Founder Ishaan Preet Singh said in a statement.
“We have over 24 months of runway to keep iterating and improving on our core business, we had to take a few difficult prioritization decisions over the past few weeks.”
Founded in 2020, FrontRow provides courses like singing, music composition, cricket, photography, and film-making from influencers in these fields.
Last year, FrontRow raised $14 million led by Eight Roads Ventures, Lightspeed, Elevation Capital and several angels including Ashneer Grover, Karan Singh, and Kunal Shah.
Nearly 6,000 start-up employees have been recently hit by layoffs In India. This includes more than a 1,000 at WhiteHat Jr and Unacademy, over 624 at Vedantu, and over 150 at Lido Learning. Ronnie Screwvala-backed Lido has also shut down operations due to lack of funds, IANS reported.
Apart from edtech firms, startups that have laid off employees in the past few months include social commerce platforms Trell (more than 300) and Meesho (150), used cars platform Cars24 (More than 600)A and digital health platform Mfine (More than 500) and many more.
