Gaurav Munjal-led Unacademy to buy back ESOPs worth Rs 30 crore

About a year after new unicorn Unacademy first bought back its employee vested stock options in the company, the Sorting Hat Technologies-owned entity on Thursday announced its plans to launch a second buyback on December 10.

The size of the planned buyback pool is likely to be around Rs 25-30 crore, depending on the number of ESOPs liquidated by employees, the edtech firm said in a statement. The buyback pool for the first one was about a tenth of the current size.

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While the programme is open to both current and former employees of the Bengaluru headquartered company, existing employees must have completed at least a year in the firm to be eligible for participation in the upcoming liquidity round, the statement said.

All vested ESOPs until December 10, 2020, will be eligible for the buyback, the company said, adding that the employees may liquidate between 25% and 100% of the vested ESOPs based on specified schemes.

In May this year, the company had increased its pool of ESOPs from 41,026 to 53,044.

Five-year-old Unacademy, founded by Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini, Hemesh Singh, joined the unicorn club in September, on the back of a $150 million round of funding led by SoftBank. The investment valued the startup at over $1.4 billion.

In addition to SoftBank, the startup is backed by Facebook, Sequoia India, Nexus Venture Partners, Steadview Capital, Blume Ventures, and individual investors such as Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar.

Other technology startups that launched or expanded their ESOPs pool this year include BharatPe, Innoviti, OYO, Swiggy, Lenskart, Ola, Paytm and CarDekho.