Merchant commerce platform: Pine Labs buys back shares worth $6 Mn from top brass
- ByStartupStory | April 13, 2022
Pine Labs, the merchant commerce platform, has initiated a share buyback program worth $6 million for its top level executives including Amrish Rau, the company’s Chief Executive Officer.
The buyback of shares worth $6.07 million from five executives, namely Amrish Rau, Dev Anand Sharma, Kumar Sudarsan, Kush Mehra, and Rakesh Sharma has been approved by the board at Pine Labs, the company’s regulatory filings in Singapore show.
Offloading shares worth $1.92 million, Amrish Rau is the biggest beneficiary of the buyback program. Kumar Sudarsan, the co-founder of Qwikcilver, has sold $1.75 million of shares. To recall, Pine Labs acquired QwikCilver in a $110 million deal in April 2019.
Chief business officer of Pine Labs, Kush Mehra, in this buyback event has diluted $1.41 million worth of shares. Shares worth $500K and $490K have been offloaded by Rakesh Sharma, vice president, and Dev Anand Sharma, senior vice president of Pine Labs, respectively.
By adding 70,000 options, Pine Labs has also increased the size of its employee stock options pool in a separate filing and the pool now includes about 1.44 million options worth $680.23 million.
Pine Labs has crossed Paytm and is only behind Flipkart and Oyo in non-listed companies, in terms of ESOP pool size. According to a report published by Longhouse Consulting in December 2021, an ESOP pool worth $2.26 billion has been created by Flipkart whereas Oyo had an ESOP pool worth $1 billion. The ESOP pool size of Paytm, Zomato, and Nykaa (public companies) stood at $610 million, $750 million, and $570 million respectively.
The Singapore-registered company also allotted ESOP worth $14 million to its CTO, CFO and dozens of other senior employees, in September 2020.
In 2021, a couple of secondary transactions in which its early backer Sequoia and many top rung stakeholders including founding members and senior employees realised windfall gains through secondary events was seen by Pine Labs.
Soon after a $13.5 million worth ESOP buyback program announced by the company during a $50 million fundraising event from private equity major Vitruvian Partners, the fresh share buyback came in. Pine Labs has raised more than $1 billion in the past couple of years and currently it is valued at over $5 billion.
An initial public offering (IPO) in the US has also been contemplated by the company. As per media reports, to raise $500 million at a valuation of $6-7 billion from the public market has been aimed by it.
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