Festive bonanza for BYJU’s employees: Value of ESOP pool crosses Rs 1,300 cr

While large-scaled Indian startups who have turned into corporations are yet to create wealth for their investors through Initial Public Offering (IPO), they certainly have been enabling early backers, co-founders and employees to score fortune through secondary transactions. 

Companies such as Paytm, OYO, BYJU’s, BookMyShow, Freshworks, PolicyBazaar, Lenskart, Swiggy and Delhivery among a few others provided about $2.5 billion worth secondary exits to early backers. 

Simultaneously, early employees of the companies mentioned above along with UrbanClap, Rivigo, Unacademy, CarDekho, Razorpay, Droom, Zerodha also hit the jackpot. Now, BYJU’s appears to be in process to make several hundred of its employees rich as the company has expanded its ESOPs pool by 3.5X.

According to RoC filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, the company has passed a resolution replacing its existing ‘ESOP plan 2015’ with ‘ESOP plan 2019’. BYJU’s has expanded its ESOP pool to 1,38,648 options from 39,390 options.

With the resolution, the company has proposed to add 99,259 shares to the ‘ESOP plan 2019’. A back-of-the-envelope calculation by Entrackr estimates the value of the revised ESOP pool is in the range of Rs 1,300-1,590 crore. 

We arrived at the value of the revised ESOPs plan by factoring in BYJU’s valuation report dated 31st March 2019 and the value at which the company allotted its Series F CCPS in July. 

While the valuation report priced each share at Rs 50,736, BYJU’s share price escalated to Rs 1,14,910 in July when the company allotted 6782 Series F CCPS to US-based Owl Ventures III LP. After allotment, the ‘ESOP plan 2019’ will be making several of BYJU’s’s employees crorepati in the coming years.

Entrackr has sent queries to BYJU's regarding revised ESOPs pool. The story will be updated as and when the response comes in.

Earlier this year, BYJU’s had announced its Series F funding round which was worth a staggering $540 million. The company had claimed to become profitable on a full-year basis with a revenue of Rs 1,430 crore in FY19. It had also claimed to have a 2.5 million strong paid user base in May 2019 from 1.26 million in June 2018.

Besides India, BYJU’s had expanded into the US and is looking for distributor partners in UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia.

BYJU’s early backer Sequoia Capital had sold out a partial stake for $185-190 million in December last year. The venture capital firm estimated to have scored handsome 11X return in the secondary transaction. 

Besides pooling in capital from several bluechip investors, the Byju Raveendran-led firm also became the first Indian company to bring Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) on its cap table. Qatar's state-owned holding company led $150 million round along with famous edtech investor Owl Ventures in July.