The Bengaluru-based startup, which raised $18 million since 2020, had laid off 90% of its employees over two rounds to rein in costs in a failing business model, before finally shutting shop in June.
“We are still talking to a few people on whether someone wants to acquire the content or the team or the intellectual property. We’re also figuring out whether we should return capital or not. We have about 20% of the capital left. We will do one of those things in the next couple of months with the board,” founder and CEO Ishaan Preet Singh told ET.
Singh added that the business had stopped scaling after about $4 million of annualised revenue with customer acquisition costs going up. “Renewals were okay but not amazing…We had always set a June deadline,” he added.
The development was first covered by TechCrunch on Monday afternoon.
FrontRow had last raised $14 million as part of its Series A funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures and GSV, in 2021. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Elevation Capital had also participated in the round. It had planned to scale up to more than 10 categories and over 300 courses over 2022 back then.
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Founded in 2020 by Shubhadit Sharma, Mikhil Raj and Ishaan Preet Singh, FrontRow offered skill-based paid courses in genres such as cricket, music and comedy. These courses were taught by celebrities and online influencers.After two years of hypergrowth, most edtech firms are rethinking their cost structures and businesses with major ones such as Byju’s, Unacademy and Vedantu undertaking back-to-back layoff exercises since 2022 to increase efficiencies and improve capital runway. In September last year, cash-strapped edtech Lido Learning also filed for bankruptcy.
Waning pandemic-led growth, financial losses and mass layoffs have gripped India’s edtech ecosystem, as a post-Covid correction has set in and several players make a beeline towards a hybrid approach of online and offline learning.