Mobility unicorn Ola has announced expansion of its employee stock options (ESOP) pool to ₹3,000 crore. The company will also be allocating an additional ₹400 crore worth of stock to employees in the run up to its IPO.

Earlier this month, Ola raised a $500-million funding from Temasek and Plum Wood Investment Ltd, an affiliate of private equity fund Warburg Pincus.

With this ESOP allocation, the company hopes to reward its high impact employees and enable long-term wealth creation for them. “Our expanded ESOP programme, along with the fresh stock allocation of ₹400 crore, enables our key talent to participate in the long-term wealth creation opportunities generated by their innovations and the impact they create. It will also reinforce their sense of ownership and align their growth with that of the company as we continue to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable mobility,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola’s Founder.

Also read: Lowering import duty on e-vehicles: Ola’s Aggarwal ‘strongly disagrees’ with Musk’s call

Ola claims to be seeing a strong recovery in its ride-hailing business in the past several months. The company also claimed to have invested significant resources in customer safety including frequent fumigation, and temperature checks among other things.

Further, the electric vehicles focussed entity, Ola Electric has recently announced the awaited electric scooter. The new e-scooter received more 1 lakh bookings in the span of 24 hours of the company opening reservations.

Ever since the pandemic, ESOPs have been gaining trend in the start-up ecosystem, as companies looked for newer ways to compensate talent. In 2020, a clutch of high valued companies such as Unacademy, Zerodha, Firstcry, BharatPe, Urban Company, MPL, CarDekho had also announced ESOP buybacks. Now with the new wave of start-up IPOs, ESOP allocations again seem to be gaining speed in the IPO-bound companies.

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