Razorpay Offers ESOP Buyback Option to Its 140 Employees, at a Premium with Tiger Global

Razorpay, India’s first converged payments solution company, today announced the implementation of their first ESOP Buyback plan for their employees. Having raised their Series B funding earlier this year, the 250 employee strong company – Razorpay is now one of the youngest Indian Startups to facilitate ESOP Buyback program in India. All existing and former employees who hold vested stocks will be eligible to sell up to 33% of their vested ESOP shares of the company. The secondary sale round is about 50% higher than the primary round. Tiger Global, one of Razorpay’s key investors is the buyer at a premium. Generally, secondaries are lower than what the company scores in its primary rounds or, at best, at par.
The share sale aims to benefit employees across ranks – from team leaders to support executives. ESOP buybacks have long been a part of employee welfare, especially in larger organizations. It is only in the recent past that the startup industry has seen positive developments like this, reflecting a healthy growth of the startup and the ecosystem.
Being a testimony to the exponential growth the company has witnessed in a span of three years, Harshil Mathur, CEO & Co-Founder of Razorpay said, “At Razorpay, we make conscious and continuous efforts towards doing what benefits our employees the most. The ESOP buyback model is one such instance as it gives us the opportunity to acknowledge employees’ proven contribution to company, while aiding their opportunities for creating wealth. About 140 employees as young as 23 years old will be eligible to participate in the programme.”
Most organizations in India or even in the Silicon Valley wait at least 5 to 7 years and several rounds of funding before venturing into ESOP Buyback. Razorpay has been able to implement this sooner than many others, thanks to the fast paced growth of the team.
Currently powering online payments for more than 100,000 small & large businesses such as Airtel, Zomato, IRCTC, GoIbibo, Zoho, DSP Blackrock, Zerodha among others, Razorpay has clocked in a healthy growth rate of 30-35% month-on-month and is geared to increase its merchant count to 2,00,000 by next year. The 2.0 product suite launched last year now contributes to 20% of Razorpay’s revenue and the company expects more than 10x growth in volume and revenue by next fiscal year.
In January 2018, Razorpay raised $20 million in funding led by Tiger Global and Y Combinator with participation from Matrix Partners. It is using a significant portion of the proceeds from that to launch new products and strengthen its engineering team.