While announcing the development to the internal team, Gaurav Munjal, the Co-founder and CEO of Unacademy (1) stated that employees with a currently vested ESOP value of 40 lakh INR more could liquidate 25% of vested options. Moreover, employees with vested ESOP values between 10 to 40 lakh INR can liquidate around 10 lakh INR, while employees with currently vested ESOPs values of less than 10 lakh INR can liquidate 100%.
Notably, in the previous month, Unacademy had secured a 150 million USD round. Softbank led the fundraising with the valuation of the Bengaluru-based firm around 1.4 billion USD.
Estimates suggest that the ESOP pool of Unacademy now has 64,957 options. Moreover, each opportunity is equal to one equity share, and the whole ESOP pool of the company is standing at 930 Crore INR or 127 million USD worth.
Unacademy to Become Fifth Firm in the Indian Startup Ecosystem for ESOP Buyback
With the latest buyback plan, Unacademy will soon become the fifth company in startup India’s ecosystem to initiate ESOP buyback. Previous, Zerodha, FirstCry, MPL, and Meesho had allowed its employees to liquidate their vested ESOP.
Notably, the stockbroking platform, Zerodha, had bought 60 to 65 crore INR worth ESOPs. Whereas, FirstCry is allowing its employees to liquidate their ESOP worth 31 crore INR.
Meesho, a social commerce app, had offered ESOP buyback worth seven crore INR. MPL, Mobile Premier League, had also announced ESOPs buyback valued at 25 crore INR or 3.2 million USD soon after securing a 90 million USD funding round.
The current year has been suitable for startup employees so far as several companies have expanded their ESOPs pool and fresh allotments. As per the reports, more than twelve firms have either allotted, developed, or introduced ESOP plans in 2020. The long list of such startups includes, Paytm, Zomato, Oyo, Pine Labs, Byju’s, ShareChat, Fleetx, Jodo, and Shuttl.
