Chennai-headquartered upskilling startup Skill-Lync, which provides job opportunities to students upon completion of the programme, has become the latest edtech startup to layoff employees due to a funding crunch.
The startup, which has a headcount of over 2,000 as per its LinkedIn page, fired over 400 employees last week in a restructuring exercise, sources told Inc42.
Skill-Lync cofounder SuryaNarayanan PaneerSelvam informed the employees about the layoffs in an internal mail and attributed it to the “recent macroeconomic conditions”. Inc42 has accessed the mail sent by PaneerSelvam.
“This doesn’t reflect in any way on the performance of the individual,” the cofounder wrote in the mail.
The impacted employees were from sales, marketing, pre-sales, tech and talent acquisition departments. The startup offered severance packages to the laid off employees based on their respective notice periods.
Besides, Skill-Lync also closed the shutters of its Delhi NCR office post the latest layoff round, the sources told Inc42. Earlier, it had closed its Mumbai and Pune offices and let go of around 300-400 employees, sources added.
The startup confirmed the latest layoffs to Inc42 in a statement. “Given the macroeconomic conditions, we’ve decided to moderate our growth expectations and slow down some of our projects focused on the future. In the existing business, we have changed our delivery model to provide better learning outcomes using a combination of technology and experts – This led to some role redundancy,” PaneerSelvam said in the statement.
“We’ve decided to consolidate our operations across Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, with only corporate-facing teams operating from Pune/Delhi which further led to some headcount reduction. We’ve also reduced the hierarchy in our organisation for more agile decision making and accountability,” he added.
As per the sources, Skill-Lync has been struggling with a capital shortage, amid the ongoing funding winter, since November last year.
In an email sent by PaneerSelvam in November 2022, the cofounder said that the startup had INR 120 Cr in bank. Meanwhile, its expenses stood at INR 35 Cr per month and revenue at INR 26 Cr, the sources added. However, Inc42 couldn’t independently verify this.
