Swiggy expands its employee stock option pool

Naspers-backed Bundl technologies, which owns and operates food delivery platform Swiggy, has expanded its employee stock option plan (ESOP) by 14,500 shares to a total of 67,289 equity shares.

Back of the envelope calculations show that Swiggy’s total ESOP pool is valued at Rs 1,589 crore. The ESOP will be convertible into 6.19% equity stake of the company.

“For benefit of the employees of the company it is proposed to increase the pool size of ESOP shares from 52,789 shares to 67,289 shares,” the company said in a regulatory filing.

Earlier this month, the Bengaluru based company raised $34 million in a growth round at Rs 236,130 per share from Tencent Holdings, Ark Impact Asset Management, Korea Investment Partners, Samsung Ventures and Mirae Asset Capital Markets.

Founded in 2014 by Sriharsha Majety, Nandan Reddy and Rahul Jaimini, Swiggy has so far raised around $1.35 billion from several investors.

Swiggy is the second unicorn startup to have expanded its ESOP size in 2020. In February, ANI Technologies, which owns and operates ride-hailing platform Ola, increased its ESOP by 1.54 million options convertible to an equal number of equity shares.

In 2020, another startup to expand its ESOP pool this year was Lenskart.

In the union budget 2019-20, the government deferred taxes on the exercise of ESOPs by five years. Some of the other technology-based startups in India that expanded stock options for their employees in the recent past include Bounce, Byju’s and Zerodha.