Unacademy allots ESOP worth Rs 20 Cr to former VP Dinesh Godara

After announcing undisclosed round from Tiger Global and Dragoneer Investment Group at a valuation of $2 billion, edtech unicorn Unacademy has allotted ESOPs worth around Rs 20 crore to its former vice president Dinesh Godara. 

Godara played an important role in scaling up Unacademy. He was vice president of the company between November 2018 to June 2020 and led several products including Unacademy JEE, NEET, GATE, UPSC and Wifistudy.

Unacademy has passed a special resolution to approve the allotment of 1200 equity shares to Godara under its ESOP scheme 2018, shows regulatory filings. The development comes soon a month after the firm announced an ESOP buyback plan worth Rs 25-30 crore. 

Godara left the firm to start his own venture TREAD. Last month, the digital fitness startup had raised $1.1 million in a seed round from a clutch of entrepreneurs, angels and pre-seed funds including Better Capital, Roman Saini & Hemesh, Udaan founder Sujeet Kumar, CRED founder Kunal Shah.

It’s worth noting that Unacademy’s founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal has also backed TREAD in its maiden round. 

During SoftBank-led $150 million round in September, Unacademy’s ESOP pool was valued at around Rs 930 crore or $127 million. As per Fintrackr’s calculation, Unacademy’s ESOP pool consists of 64,957 options in which each option is equivalent to one equity share and the whole ESOP pool of the company is valued at around $127 million.

Unacademy will join the likes of Swiggy, FirstCry, Pine Labs, Paytm, Oyo that have expanded their ESOPs pool in 2020. This year has proved an exceptional year for Unacademy in several terms. It acquired five startups — Coursavy, PrepLadder, Mastree, CodeChef and Kreatryx — and launched a new product Graphy with a separate founding team. 

In the past three months, Byju’s and Oyo had expanded their ESOPs pool by adding Rs 1500 crore and Rs 1050 crore worth ESOPs respectively. Zetwerk, Shuttl, Wmall also added more options to their existing pool.