Exclusive: Unacademy expands ESOPs pool to $42 Mn

Ever since the lockdown has been enforced in India, online education companies have been witnessing an upsurge in usages. In fact, April 2020 was the highest video watch in a month for Unacademy in its five-year-old journey. Congratulating his team for their productivity, the company’s co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal had come forward to praise employees on Twitter.

A week later, Unacademy has recognised and rewarded employees’ work by topping up 12,018 options to its existing employee stock options (ESOPs) pool. According to new regulatory filings, the company passed a special resolution to amend its existing ESOP policy to increase its existing pool from 41,026 options to 53,044 options.

Entrackr’s calculation shows that Unacademy ESOPs’ pool is now valued at nearly Rs 312.4 crore ($42 million). With this, the company has added stock options worth Rs 71 crore to its ESOP pool.

This is the second time the Bengaluru based edtech startup has made additions to its ESOP pool in the last 6 months.  In January, the firm added 4,836 new shares to the then existing scheme and executed a “phantom stock” agreement with its co-founders Munjal, Roman Saini and Himesh Singh.

It’s worth noting that the Bengaluru-based firm had bought 30% of the vested stocks from its employees during July last year. Unacademy has also attracted enough capital in the past 12 months. After raising Series D round in June last year, it raised $110 million new round led by General Atlantic.

Post Series E round, the firm was valued $510 million.

Last week, Munjal claimed that Unacademy did more revenue in last month than all of 2017, 2018, and the first half of 2019 together. The company saw an 82% surge in revenue in April when compared to the previous month and recorded 10X growth as compared to April 2019.

Unacademy had recorded 165 million video views on YouTube in April while the total watch time of those videos stands at a staggering 1.4 billion minutes across YouTube, special classes, free as well as subscriptions.

According to our financial data tracker Fintrackr, Unacademy earned Rs 11.66 crore in revenue from operations during FY19. Its entire revenue has come through the paid subscription service, which recorded a 6.6X jump in FY19 as compared to Rs FY18. Unacademy’s expenses had increased 290% to Rs 68.43 crore in the period ending March 2019 from Rs 28.82 crore in FY18.