Reshab AgarwalPharmaeasy has been facing quite some competition with Reliance and other big companies entering the market. And COVID hasn’t also been quite generous for them. And now pharmaeasy plans to do an ESOPs buyback programme worth $3 Mn. The company plans to show some confidence to its employees by doing so and also help them during the COVID. This will also make them one of the biggest startups in India to do an ESOPs buyout.
About PharmaEasy
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Pharmaeasy is an online platform that was founded in 2015 by Dr Dhaval Shah and Dharmil Sheth. The company offers many services like lab tests, medicines, products and more in almost 1000 cities across the country. From its founding date, the company has done well and has raised many fundings along the way totalling to billion of dollars spread across 7 rounds. The most recent one of them was the Temasek funded round for $220 million.
With the growing competition, PharmaEasy merged with Medlife in September to form a powerful alliance. This was to compete with the likes of Reliance and Amazon, who were just entering the market. There have also been reports suggesting that the startup might receive investments from the private equity firm TPG at $1.2 Bn pre-money evaluation.
More about the buyback
According to some reports, the buyback is going to benefit almost 45 employees in the company. There hasn’t been much news or information about recent fundings of the company, but it was valued at $700 Mn last year. This was when the company raised funding of $220 million from Temasek.
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According to the official statement of the co-founder of the company, Dharmil Sheth, the idea of doing the buyback is to incentives to employees who have worked hard. The company is planning to allocate some funds from the amount they are rasing, for the ESOPs buyback programme. He also said this is to ensure that the affected people from the COVID get support from the company and they will even continue to do it in the future too.
The company wants its workers to be more focused on the company, and by doing an ESOP, they will have the confidence to do so.
Many small and big startups have announced ESOPs buyback programme this year. Some famous names among them are Unacademy, Zerodha, BharatPe and more. What are your thoughts on this moves by the company amidst the pandemic? Let us know in the comments below. Also, if you found our content informative, do like and share it with your friends.
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