Athira Sethu
Kochi, 12 October 2024
Whatfix recently rolled out a $58 million worth buyback programme that is now open to employees and investors. This comes just a month after the organization had announced a successful fundraising worth $125 million from investors.
The buyback would be at a higher premium than the previous round, where a couple of the current and former executives sold their stock options.
Since the last funding round of $90 million, Whatfix has scaled significantly. It was the first to raise funds from the SoftBank Vision Fund II. The company doubled its headcount and has over 960 employees. This period also saw the opening of new offices in Singapore, Germany, Australia, and India.
Whatfix, which was valued around $900 million after the latest round of funding led by Warburg Pincus in September, is offering more than a 50% increase in valuation from the previous round and included both new investments and sales from current investors like Helion Venture Partners and Eight Roads Ventures.
Whatfix co-founder and CEO, Khadim Batti said that the buyback programme will align well with the company’s growth aspirations while acknowledging the role of players who have been the prime catalyst to its success story.
“We are creating an ownership and innovation culture that enables all employees and investors to bet on the growth of the company,” he added.
Launched in 2014, Whatfix is basically a digital adoption platform with training simulations and no-code application analytics. These help organizations improve user productivity, ensure compliance to processes, and allow them to improve the user experience for both internal and customer-facing applications.
The company counts more than 700 companies such as Shell, Microsoft, Schneider Electric, Cisco, UPS Supply Chain Solutions, and Genuine Parts Co as its clients.
In July 2021, Whatfix executed its first buyback of an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) worth $4.3 million.
Other companies had also announced buybacks in the past few months. For example, food delivery company Swiggy, which is looking to go public, completed its fifth buyback of ESOPs worth $65 million on July 15. At-home services platform, Urban Company had announced its fifth and biggest ESOP secondary sale programme for around $25 million on May 23.
