FrontRow raised $14 million led by Eight Roads Ventures and GSV in a Series A round a few months ago. After the freshly raised fund the organization intended to utilize the assets to scale to more than 10 classifications and 300 courses throughout the following year.
But according to the recent attributes, the tables have turned. FrontRow has entered the list of Indian startups to lay off workers amid continuous financing and economic situations.
The layoffs came with certain impacts throughout the system. Let’s get to know more about the organization, its story, and what is there in the future.
FrontRow And Its Story
Founded in the year 2020, it is a Chandigarh-based platform. FrontRow was founded by Shubhaditt Sharma, Mikhil Raj, and Ishaan Preet Singh.
It is an online stage giving multi-disciplinary courses which give pre-kept non-scholastic courses in various fields like games, singing, music, satire, and so forth.
“We launched Front Row with a simple core belief – pursuing your passion is a fundamental human need. Our goal is to help you learn in the best way possible, across categories and mediums. The next decade will see new paradigms of learning, built online first, and better than offline! For this, we’re building a new model of community and cohort led learning that is a fundamental evolution of edtech,”~ cofounder Ishaan Preet Singh.
The plan was to use the funds to utilize the assets to scale to 10+ classes and 300+ courses by 2022. FrontRow professes to have 50K+ paid students across 2000+ urban communities around the world.
To make it more amusing, FrontRow offers courses delivered by Indian superstars and influencers. Some of the renowned names which are part of it are Amit Trivedi, Biswa Kalyan Rath, Neha Kakkar, DIVINE, and Suresh Raina.
All of them make sure that they provide the best in their fields and with the deep knowledge they have. FrontRow rivals different firms like Celebrity School, Mento, and Kyt.
“Almost 70% of learning is outside the classroom and that’s the part that hasn’t been solved yet. We enable people to learn from the best, and the small cohorts and community create a learning experience miles ahead of anything out there. In fact, we see over 100K+ users learn through our communities every month!” ~ Mikhil Raj, co-founder, FrontRow.
The investors had their beliefs about the organization.
“As financial backers, we’ve been a major boss of the job innovation will play in disturbing various areas, including training.
We accept the market is profoundly under-presented areas of strength with patterns in advanced reception of non-scholarly learning driven by restricted accessibility of qualified educators, adaptability in planning, and absence of admittance to the organized educational program.
Ishaan, Mikhil Shubhadit, and the group at FrontRow have taken the ‘quest for enthusiasm’ computerized when hardly any others have in India. These were the words from Aditya Systla, Partner, Eight Roads Ventures.
What Comes After The LayOff
On Friday when the news of Lightspeed-backed startup FrontRow laying off the employees went viral several things came into notice.
The reports say FrontRow laid off around 30% of its workforce, it is believed that about 140+ employees were fired.
Some sources from Inc42 say that the sales group, the quality control group, and the HR group were seriously affected during the cutbacks.
Also, no severance bundles were there for these employees although they were paid with the compensation for the period of May as of now.
“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…”~ Ishaan Preet Singh
In the end, they said that they needed to take a couple of troublesome prioritization choices throughout the course of recent weeks. To guarantee to accomplish that objective throughout the decades.
So letting go of the 30% of the group essentially in sales was not something good but was an essential step to ensure that they emerge from this market strong.
FrontRow would have made it to the list of organizations to lay off their staff but they are hoping for heights. In recent many organization has come up with similar choices to make sure about their offerings and capabilities. Let’s wait and watch where all this leads to.
