Ninjacart adds stocks worth $55 Mn for staff and founders

Joining the likes of many growth and late-stage startups, B2B agritech firm Ninjacart has expanded its employee stock option (ESOPs) pool and also created a separate pool to issue more shares to its co-founders. The development comes soon after raising new money by the Bengaluru-based company in its Series D round.

The board of Ninjacart has passed a special resolution to enlarge its ESOP pool by 3,366 options, its regulatory filing with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows.

The Tiger Global-backed company already has an ESOP pool of 3,156 options which has now been increased to 6,522 after adding new options. As per Fintrackr’s estimates, the fresh options are worth Rs 178 crore while its total ESOP pool is now worth Rs 344 crore or $43.5 million.

Besides the expansion of the ESOP pool, Ninjacart has passed another resolution to create a pool of 4,996 shares for co-founders: Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Kartheeswaran K.K, Vasudevan C and Sharath Babu Loganathan.

Nagarajan and K.K will get 2,397 shares each while Vasudevan and Loganathan will be issued 101 shares each from the pool. According to Fintrackr’s estimates, the newly created pool for the four co-founders is worth Rs 264 crore or $33 million.

The seven-year-old startup is a soonicorn and is currently valued at around $815 million. In terms of valuation, it competes with DeHaat, Absolute, and Wacool which have been valued at around $500 million, $500 million, and $460 million respectively.

While Ninjacart is yet to file its financial statement for FY22, its operating revenue grew 61% to Rs 755 crore in FY21. The company also managed to improve unit economics as its losses contracted 22.5% to Rs 375.7 crore in FY21. In the agritech space, Ninjacart emerged as the leader in terms of revenue followed by Waycool and DeHaat. LightBox-backed Waycool posted Rs 382 crore revenue in FY21 whereas Patna-based DeHaat’s collection grew Rs 358 crore during the same period.

According to data compiled by Fintrackr,  around 100 agritech startups raised close to $1.33 billion across 139 deals between January 2020 and June 2022. Vegrow, Veg Route, Produze and Loopworm also raised funding in the past three months.