1 week Ago By Rishabh Bhatnagar
Fintech unicorn Razorpay said on Tuesday it would extend employee stock ownership plans worth Rs 1 lakh to each of its current employees as part of its 10-year celebrations. "It is uncommon for companies to undertake such initiatives on a large scale, particularly by uniformly allocating fresh ESOPs to all current employees across all levels. For many employees, this marks their first-ever ESOP allocation," Razorpay said in a statement.
This is Razorpay's third employee liquidity event. Its first ESOP buyback was in 2018, which enabled 140 employees to liquidate their vested shares. It had another $75 million ESOP buyback in 2022, benefiting 650 existing and former employees.
Razorpay has reached more than 30 crore end consumers across India and clocked in an annualised total payment volume of $180 billion. It has expanded beyond being a payment gateway provider to having its own marketing stack platform, payroll management system, sound boxes, among others. A potential IPO for the company can come sooner, but it is looking at a two-year timeline, co-founder Harshil Mathur had told NDTV Profit in February.
The reverse flipping process is currently underway as the company seeks to change its domicile from the US to India and list here, he had said. "We are clear that we want to list in India only, the process is such that it takes a lot of approvals." One of the key metrics to gauge whether Razorpay is ready is to be profitable across revenue streams, he said.
The Bengaluru-based omnichannel payments platform was founded in 2014, and has raised nearly $750 million from marquee investors like Lone Pine Capital, TCV, GIC, Tiger Global and Peak XV Partners..
