Edtech startup 'Udayy' lays off all 100 employees as schools, and colleges physically reopen

Another edtech startup Udayy, backed by Info Edge, has shut shop, laying off all 100 employees as schools, colleges and physical tuition centres reopen.

Udayy's co-founder Saumya Yadav said that the startup was witnessing the post-pandemic world for the first time as "as the kids went back to school, we faced roadblocks in growing the original model of online, live learning".

"After a lot of deliberation, we decided that it's better to shut down the business than to spend more time and capital on it,a Yadav said.

The development was first reported by startup news coverage portal Entrackr.

The startup has paid employees severance packages and helped them find new jobs.

"We are returning the remaining capital, around $8.5 million back to our investors," Yadav was quoted as saying in media reports.

The live-learning platform catered to students from Grades 1 to 5.

The platform raised $2.5 million in a seed funding round led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI), managed by Falcon Edge Capital and InfoEdge Ventures.

Udayy is the second edtech startup after Lido Learning to completely shut operations.

Led by the edtech platforms, over 8,000 start-up employees have been recently hit by layoffs In India.

This includes more than 1,000 employees at WhiteHat Jr, over 600 at Unacademy, over 424 at Vedantu and over 150 at Lido Learning.

Another edtech firm FrontRow laid off nearly 150 full-time and contractual employees earlier this week.

The Bengaluru-based non-academic upskilling startup fired almost 30 per cent of its workforce, owing to fund crunch and the market downturn.

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) and digital health platform Mfine (more than 500), among others.