Vestd is betting on India’s growing ESOP ecosystem

Equity is one of the most powerful tools available to companies. It helps founders attract talent, reward contributors, and align everyone around a shared vision of success. Yet the process of translating equity into actual ownership is often far more complicated.

In India, issuing equity involves legal documentation, compliance requirements, board approvals and regulatory filings. Hence, for many startups, the process gets pushed down the priority list. Sometimes, the paperwork never catches up with the promise. Other times, shares are handed over too early before milestones have been met, leaving founders with little recourse if expectations are not fulfilled. 

Vestd wants to simplify this process.

The London-headquartered company helps businesses issue and manage employee equity digitally, covering everything from ESOP grants and vesting schedules to cap table management and shareholder reporting through a single platform. 

Founded in 2014 by Ifty Nasir, Vestd describes itself as the UK’s first FCA-regulated digital share platform. It entered India in 2025 through the acquisition of Trica Equity, the equity management platform founded by Shanti Mohan and Sanjay Jha under the LetsVenture umbrella in 2019. 

At the time of the acquisition, Trica Equity worked with close to 1,000 startups, including 11 unicorns and around 150 post-Series A companies.

For Nasir, the opportunity in India goes beyond digitising paperwork. Underlying the business is a belief he calls the “Ownership Effect”: the idea that employees work differently when they own part of the company they are helping build. 

"The industry needs to create visibility and an ecosystem that promotes equity participation more broadly, so that the idea reaches people who are currently unaware of it as a tool," he says. 

The problem with equity promises

The concept isn't new. Nasir traces it to the EOA's 2017 Ownership Effect Inquiry, which found that employees with even small stakes show higher engagement and stay with companies longer, their interests aligning with the business's success. 

The idea has academic roots too: in 1992, psychologist James K. Beggan documented the "mere ownership effect," the finding that people tend to value things more highly simply because they own them. But despite the popularity of ESOPs among startups, administering them is cumbersome.

This is where Vestd's software comes in.

At the centre of the platform is vesting, the mechanism that allows employees to earn shares gradually over time or after hitting specific milestones. 

Instead of managing this manually through spreadsheets, emails, and legal documents, companies can create equity schemes on the platform, define vesting conditions and issue digital grant letters that can be signed electronically.

The platform also handles situations that arise later in the employee lifecycle, such as departures, option exercises and liquidity events. As employees reach milestones, Vestd automatically tracks progress, sends notifications and records the transfer of ownership.

Beyond ESOPs, Vestd manages cap tables, the constantly evolving record of who owns what in a company. 

As startups raise capital, issue new shares or bring in investors, ownership structures become increasingly complex. Founders, finance teams, and investors need accurate records showing how holdings change over time and how future funding rounds could affect each stakeholder's share. 

Vestd updates these records automatically and allows companies to model different fundraising scenarios before making decisions.

The platform also supports investment rounds through a secure data room, letting founders share documents with prospective investors while controlling who sees what.

On data security, Vestd is ISO 27001 certified and hosts customer data on AWS, with primary storage in Ireland and backups held in London. Data is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and the platform maintains strict segregation between customers despite running on shared infrastructure.

The application itself is built in-house, with AI used selectively across features and AWS providing the underlying infrastructure and security guardrails. 

Who is it built for?

While startups remain a key customer segment, Vestd's target market extends beyond early-stage ventures. The platform works with businesses ranging from young companies to post-IPO companies managing more complex ownership structures. 

Founders can use equity to attract talent and companies can design retention programmes based on tenure. Performance-linked rewards can be tied to specific milestones and business outcomes. 

Once these schemes are established, Vestd tracks and administers them through the life of the programme, which typically spans three to five years.

For finance teams and company secretaries, the appeal lies in visibility.

The platform provides a real-time view of shareholding structures, funding history, dilution and ownership across different classes of shares. Users can also model hypothetical scenarios to understand how changes in valuation might affect stakeholders.

Employees, meanwhile, get a clear picture of what their equity could eventually be worth at different valuations. Instead of receiving an option grant and filing it away, they can track vesting progress and run valuation scenarios through the platform.

Pricing follows a subscription model, which is per recipient per year. The onboarding typically takes between one week and a month depending on the scale of the business and recipient count.

Vestd also provides ongoing administration and compliance support after implementation. 

Vestd says its India business already serves more than 10% of the country's unicorns, alongside a wider base of early and mid-stage startups, and that India ARR has grown by more than 50%.

According to Zion Market Research, the global equity management software market was valued at $800 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $2.5 billion by 2034, growing at 12% annually. 

In India, Vestd competes with players such as EquityList and Qapita, both of which have benefited from the country's growing startup ecosystem and increasing awareness of employee ownership.

What’s next? 

For now, the immediate focus is integration. 

Vestd is working to bring together the Trica and Vestd platforms into a single product. One of the priorities is deeper integration with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, a capability that neither platform previously offered. 

The company also plans to expand its presence across India's major startup hubs, Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, over the next few years.

Nasir, however, sees the larger challenge as education rather than competition.

The category is relatively young, and many founders still view equity as something to address later rather than as a tool for building teams from the outset.

His preferred analogy is simple. "You can have 100% of a grape, or 50 to 60% of a watermelon,” he says. “If everybody is invested in the success of the business and collectively lifting it, a smaller percentage of something large is worth far more than 100% of something that stays small."

Vestd hopes that argument will strike a chord with Indian founders as employee ownership moves from a startup perk to a more formal part of company building.