FrontRow – Lays off 30% of its workforce

Frontrow – Bengaluru(India) based startup that deals with providing online classes for non-academic skills joins the list of startups hit with recent layoffs trend. As per the confirmed sources – the company seems to have let go a total of 145 employees from a total headcount of 500 employees.

Most of the layoffs come from the sales, quality control and the HR teams. Apparently the company has not announced any severance package to the sacked employees.

“As we’ve scaled our business over the last year, we had invested heavily in growth, particularly as we’ve been creating a new category. Recently, given the market conditions we’ve prioritised increasing efficiencies across the business both through higher automation and focussing on profitable channels. Our mission remains the same – enabling everyone to learn what they love. To ensure that we achieve that goal over the next decades and that we have over 24 months of runway to keep iterating and improving on our core business we had to take a few difficult prioritisation decisions over the past few weeks. This included letting go of -30% of our team, primarily in sales, to make sure that we come out of this market stronger.”
– Ishaan Preet Singh, cofounder of FrontRow

The company seems to have caught up in the same struggle as the recent startups that have been announcing layoffs. This announcement comes 8 months after the company had raised $14mn funding as part of its Series A funding from Lightspeed, Eight Road Ventures, GSV and Capital.