upGrad-owned Harappa lays off 30% of its employees: Report

New Delhi-based edtech startup Harappa  Education, which was acquired by Ronnie Screwvala’s upGrad last July at a value of Rs 300 crore ($38 million), has reportedly laid off about 60 employees or 30% of its 200-strong workforce.

The layoffs were announced in the last week of December and have primarily been in the content division. Affected employees have been told to serve a month's notice, and no other severance benefits have been offered to them, Business Today reported.

This is the first phase of layoffs, the report further added, and there could be more.

YourStory has reached out to the company for further queries and is awaiting a response.

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Co-founded by Pramath Raj Sinha and Shreyasi Singh in 2018, Harappa has over 600,000 learners and 200 enterprise clients. Its programmes focus on cognitive, social, and behavioral skills. 

In September 2022, upGrad invested an additional Rs 320 crore (nearly $40 million) in the platform to create Harappa Global School of Leadership to strengthen its soft-skill and leadership offering for working professionals. 

“We plan on launching the Leadership School globally with a focus on the mature and paying market in the US, in six months’ time. We will take a business-to-business (B2B) approach for the US market,” Ronnie Screwvala, Chairperson and Co-founder at upGrad, told YourStory in an earlier conversation.

Since its inception, upGrad has acquired 14 companies under different verticals—upskilling and reskilling programmes, test prep, courses for college students, study abroad segment, and short skilling courses.

However, the acquisition of Exampur, an online learning startup for competitive examinations, fell through last December.

In November, IPO-bound upGrad also announced plans to consolidate all its mergers and acquisitions in India into One upGrad, and complete the integration process by March-June 2023.