Bengaluru-based edtech startup FrontRow has laid off 75% of its workforce, about 130 employees. Entracker report.
“This was of course a difficult decision, but when you look at our business, the push we made to sales and marketing was unsustainable and the wrong way to build our business. I noticed,” he tweeted.
“We remain very bullish on our products and problem areas and will be back with new avatars soon,” the tweet added.
In May of this year, the hobby-learning startup laid off about 145 employees, about 30% of its workforce, citing tough “market conditions.”
The startup will help laid-off people get jobs across engineering, product, sales, generalist, operations, or customer support roles.
FrontRow’s business model is similar to MasterClass, a San Francisco-based Edtech startup, with celebrities coming to teach courses in their respective fields. Courses offered by the startup include Singing by Neha Kakkar, Comedy by Biswa Kalyan Rath, Fast Bowling by Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Batting by Suresh Raina, and Spin Bowling by Yuzvendra Chahal.
Just last week, BYJU’S also announced it was taking jabs on a celebrity-led course. The next session will be with Viswanathan Anand, India’s first chess grandmaster, on October 16th.
FrontRow raised a $14 million Series A round last month led by Eight Roads Ventures and GSV, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed and Elevation Capital. Also participating in this round were angels such as Vishal Dhadlani, Raftaar, Kunal Shah, Gaurav Munjal and Farid Ahsan.
At the time of the funding, the startup said it had scaled to over 50,000 paying learners in 2,000 cities around the world, and users have spent more than 1 million hours learning on FrontRow.
Edtech startups have enjoyed rapid growth and funding momentum since the pandemic began, but the sector appears to have lost that momentum. Layoffs have been occurring in recent months at BYJU’S owned companies such as his WhiteHat Jr, Unacademy and Vedantu.
On Wednesday, October 12, BYJU’S announced that it will lay off approximately 5% of its employees across its product, content, media, and technical teams to avoid redundancy and overlapping roles.
Last month, Lido Learning, an edtech startup backed by Ronnie Screwvala, filed for bankruptcy and bankruptcy on the Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal due to lack of funds.
