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Edtech unicorn Vedantu has announced that it has laid off 200 employees as part of its annual review. The report said the Bengaluru-headquartered startup fired 120 full-time employees and 80 contractors — a 3.5 percent of its total workforce of 6,000 employees.

However, a company spokesperson said that this layoff was not a cost-cutting measure but the result of the annual review of its employees.

“We have an annual contract with them, and at the beginning of every academic year, we follow a process of load rebalancing, where we rejig pertaining to these roles based on our growth expectations,” said the spokesperson.

As such, the company is looking to hire in more than 1,000 roles, with around 100 in similar functions to those recently laid off.

Vedantu — founded by Vamsi Krishna, Anand Prakash, and Pulkit Jain in 2011 — became the fifth edtech startup to gain unicorn status last year, when it raised $100 million in its Series E round led by Singapore-based ABC World Asia.

This news comes on the back of thousands of layoffs in the startup industry in 2022, with over 2,000 employees laid off from companies such as Unacademy, Meesho, Furlenco, Trell, and OkCredit.

LIDO Learning, which started this trend in early 2022, was highly criticised for its mass firing of up to 200 employees in February. In September 2021, it had raised $10 million from Ronnie Screwvala.