After Meesho and Unacademy, PharmEasy gives employees $3M ESOPs buyback option

Pharmeasy, the Mumbai-based healthtech and medicine delivery platform, has announced that it is offering to buy back ESOPs worth $3 million from its employees.

The initiative, announced during Diwali, was announced to honour the support and trust that the employees have showcased in the company from the beginning, and especially during the past few months as business surged with people seeking home delivery of healthcare products and services.

​Dharmil Sheth, Co-Founder, PharmEasy, said, “We have been incentivising team members with ESOPs as an opportunity for wealth creation in line with the company growth. With this buyback, we want to reward the team for their contribution in building PharmEasy.”

PharmEasy is backed by investors such as Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek Holdings,  Bessemer Venture Partners, Eight Roads Ventures, Everstone Private Equity Fund, Fundamentum Partnership, and Canadian pension fund CDPQ, among others.

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Dhaval Shah, Co- Founder, PharmEasy, said: “We believe that our team is our biggest strength and as a part of our current transaction we have decided to buy back ESOPs from early team members in active employment amounting to $3 million.”

Earlier this week, social commerce platform Meeshoannounced that it had implemented an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) buyback for its employees. The Facebook-backed company said the total amount of the ESOP buyback programme would be $5 million.

Food delivery platform Swiggy also announced that was providing a secondary liquidity option of ESOPs from its employees. 

The impact of COVID-19, including job losses, salary cuts, furloughs, and more, has forced companies to take new measures to deal with operational losses.

Bengaluru-based edtech startup Unacademyalso said it would undertake an ESOP buyback programme of Rs 25-30 crore in December this year. Unacademy conducted its first ESOP buyout in September 2019, and at that time, the buyback pool was about a tenth of the current buyback size.

"One of the main reasons why PharmEasy is buying back ESOPs is because of the financial crisis that COVID-19 has brought on to the world," a company statement said.