Tiger Global brings fortune for Razorpay's ESOPs holders

The year 2018 so far has yielded a good return for ESOPs holders in firms such as Ola, Flipkart, Paytm, Swiggy, Rivigo, and Droom. The trend is looking to continue as Tiger Global, a major investor in digital payment solutions startup Razorpay has started to buy back shares of its 140 employees.

For Razorpay, this is the first instance when its employees ranging from team leaders to support executives at its call centre are encashing their stock option.

The share sale which reportedly started in September was also open to former employees of Razorpay who had spent at least one year in the startup.

Further, the promoters, including Razorpay Co-founder Shashank Kumar, have not participated in the secondary transaction that is expected to close by this month.

According to Harshil Mathur, CEO, Razorpay, the startup negotiated a secondary deal with Tiger Global at a valuation decided during its last funding round in January, this year. Additionally, the transaction was done at a 50 per cent premium to the valuation, reports ET.

Tiger Global and Y Combinator led a $20 million Series B round in Razorpay at a valuation of around $100 million. The Lee Fixel-led investment firm holds about 25-30 per cent stake in the Bengaluru-based startup.

Of late, Razorpay had stepped into the enterprise lending space as a part of its 2.0 strategy to become a full-stack fintech company. Last month, a Deloitte report ranked Razorpay as the second fastest growing tech company in India.

Founded in 2014 by Kumar and Mathur, it provides online payments solution for more than 100,000 businesses, including Ibibo, Yatra, Zomato, BookMyShow, IRCTC, and Zoho. Further, it aims to increase its merchant count to 200,000 by the December 2018.

The startup has raised over $31 million risk capital from the aforementioned investors along with Matrix Partners, Mastercard, and 33 angel investors.