Elevation Capital-backed agritech startup Vegrow creates ESOPs pool

Fresh farm produce supply chain startup Vegrow has created a new Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) pool worth Rs 26 crore or $3.5 million to reward its employees. This comes amidst many early and growth-stage startups creating and expanding their ESOPs pool and buying back shares from staff.

Vegrow has passed a special resolution to adopt an ESOPs Plan with 16,308 options with each option exercisable into 1 equity share of the company, the company’s regulatory filings with MCA show. 

The newly adopted ESOP pool is worth around Rs 26 crore representing around 7.24% of the outstanding equity share capital of the company. 

The development comes after seven months of the Vegrow’s Series A round in which the Bengaluru-based company scooped up $13 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Elevation Capital. Matrix Partners India among others. 

The startup has raised $15.5 million to date and is valued at around $50 million, according to our data platform Fintrackr’s estimates.

Entrackr was first to report Vegrow’s Series A round in May.

Founded by Praneeth Kumar, Shobhit Jain, Mrudhukar Batchu and Kiran Naik, Vegrow smoothens the supply chain for fruits and vegetables. Its technology platform provides farm discovery, quality profiling, market intelligence to businesses whereas farmers get advisory, packaging and logistics support from Vegrow.

According to the company, it has scaled up rapidly among both farmers and B2B customers, resulting in nearly 20 fold topline growth with a presence in over 30 cities. 

Vegrow majorly operates in Karnataka and competes with Dailyninja, Waycool and Zomato’s HyperPure.

Startups across early and growth stages have been emphasising on adopting, allocating and buyback of ESOPs to reward their employees in the past couple of years. For context, around one dozen Indian startups including Cars24, Gramophone, Slice, TheMathCompany, Bizongo, LEAD, FarEye, HomeLane, Trell, Ninjacart, Waycool and Porter have already announced their ESOP buyback program in 2022.

As per Fintrackr,  homegrown startups had bought back ESOP worth more than $440 million in 2021, a nearly nine-fold jump from $50 million in the previous year.

Besides institutional investors, Vegrow also counts several angels including Sanjiv Rangrass, Rohit MA, Ramakant Sharma and Amit Lakhotia as its early backers.