Westbridge Capital-backed edtech unicorn PhysicsWallah, on Monday announced plans to hire about 2,500 employees across its verticals over the next two months.
“The hiring spree is aligned with the brand’s growth goals as it continues to provide learning opportunities to students,” according to a press statement.
The edtech firm will hire faculty members and professionals for its allied roles including business and data analysts, counsellors, operations managers, batch managers, teachers, among others.
The development comes at a time when Indian startups have seen over 22,000 employees being laid off in the last one year citing cost-optimization, along with corporate reorganization as the key reasons. Some companies also saw performance-related layoffs.
As part of its growth plans, the Westbridge-backed firm entered the upskilling segment with the acquisition of Bengaluru-based iNeuron.ai last month, as PhysicsWallah aims to become a full-stack edtech company through multiple acquisitions.
The unicorn aims to continue expansion while remaining profitable.
Its standalone net profit grew more over 14x to Rs 97.8 crore in the year-ended March 2022 from Rs 6.93 crore the previous year.
Founded in 2020 by Prateek Maheshwari and Alakh Pandey, PhysicsWallah helps students prepare for engineering and medical entrance exams through lectures and sessions on YouTube, the PhysicsWallah app and its website. It competes with Byju’s, Unacademy and Vedantu, among others. The company is now adding more courses to its content portfolio by developing them in-house or via strategic deals.
While things may look upbeat for PhysicsWallah, the last one year has been an arduous journey for the broader startup ecosystem.
Recently, Accel-backed after-sales services startup Onsitego laid off about 60-70 of its employees due to performance-based churn. Grocery-focused social commerce startup Dealshare also laid off 100 employees, or around 6% of its 1,500-workforce across several verticals as part of a corporate realignment process.
Earlier this month, edtech unicorn Unacademy said it will be letting go of 20% workforce from its subsidiary Relevel as it looks to pivot its upskilling platform’s core operations to building a professional network, NextLevel.
However, another edtech unicorn, Lead School, which sacked nearly 60 more staff earlier this month, in its second round of layoffs in less than six months, raised a Rs 160 crores in a debt funding round co-led by Alteria Capital and Stride Ventures, to finance the company’s organic and inorganic growth ambitions.
UpGrad-owned edtech platform Harappa Education has also let go of around 70 employees or 35% of its 200-strong workforce, VCCircle reported earlier this month.