Edtech unicorn Unacademy has moved to monthly vesting of its employee stock option plans (ESOPs), tweeted Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Gaurav Munjal.
The ESOP vesting is across four years with a one-year cliff, he said.
In July last year, the Bengaluru based startup rolled out teacher stock options for 300 educators as an incentive for those teachers who have been with the platform for long.
Few months later in October, the edtech startup also announced its third and largest ESOPs buyback worth $10.5 million for its team members and educators.
Over the past year, Indian startups have been exploring creative ways to hire—and retain—staff, including expanding their ESOPs, as they battle each other and more established companies for talent. The startups have also been more agile in conducting ESOP buyback programmes.
Earlier in Feburary, business-to-business (B2B) marketplace Udaan decided to remove the one-year cliff on ESOPs that mandated people to wait for a year before vesting their ESOPs, and allow all future ESOP allocations to vest every quarter.
Meanwhile, Unacademy is among the several startups who have laid off their employees this year.
Last month, Unacademy, operated by Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt Ltd, laid off nearly 600 employees comprising nearly 10% of its workforce, VCCircle had reported. The previous month, it had let go over 100 employees from its PrepLadder team amid “restructuring” of the organization.
Unacademy is currently valued at $3.44 billion and counts global venture capital (VC) firms, including Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management and SoftBank, among others, as its backers.
Munjal had announced the company’s plans to go public in March during the launch of experience offline store in New Delhi called ‘Unacademy Store’
Munjal had then added that the company’s core business was on track to achieve profitability. According to the spokesperson, the company is "focused on becoming profitable by the end of Q4 CY2022 (fourth quarter of calendar year 2022) in our core business, while investing for growth in our group companies.”
