Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Paytm, has pledged his personal stock in the ecommerce arm of Paytm, Paytm Mall for the employee stock option pool. Sharma will be pledging about 5% of his stock, which amounts to $ 50 million, to the ESOP corpus which will then become 10% of the overall company. This move to pledge personal stock to the ESOP corpus comes after Flipkart completed the largest buyback by a privately held Indian startup worth $ 100 million.
Owned and operated by One97 Communications, Paytm Mall was launched in February this year as a new version of Paytm’s three year old ecommerce arm. Confirming the move, Sharma said, “I have given parts of my holding towards the employee share pool. I had done something similar long time back for One97 Communications and I have done this now for Paytm Mall.” Several employees of the Paytm’s parent One97 Communications encashed their stocks worth about Rs. 100 crores, earlier this year.
According to filings with the Registrar of Companies, Sharma had a 19% stake in Paytm Mall which will be reduced to 14% post this allocation. Paytm Mall offers a unique combination of the mall and bazaar concepts to Indian consumers. Backed by China based ecommerce major, Alibaba, the ecommerce arm of Paytm has built its marketplace by selling apparel, footwear, smartphones, bus tickets and movie tickets.
Paytm Mall raised close to $ 200 million from Alibaba and SAIF Partners in March this year. Following this investment, Paytm further invested up to $ 2.5 billion in the ecommerce platform to compete against Flipkart and Amazon over the top spot in the ecommerce industry. The company is also in talks with the Japan based venture capital firm Softbank to raise fresh funds. Currently, according to Hurun India’s Rich List 2017, Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the 6th richest India with a net worth of $ 1.47 billion.