PhonePe, the digital payments platform, on Friday announced a buyback of employee stock options (Esops) worth Rs 135 crore.

Such a liquidity event is not new to the start-up universe as entities such as Razorpay, Zerodha, Swiggy, Acko, Licious, Meesho and CRED have come up with similar buybacks. While such a programme is expected to help in retaining and attracting talent, it is generally offered during appraisal, hiring or a reward programme.

In a statement, the Walmart-owned company said the buyback offer follows a three-tier model based on seniority. The company’s founders —Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer —will not be participating in the buyback. However, the top leadership can sell up to 10 per cent of their vested stock.

All other current employees can sell up to 25 per cent of their vested stock. The company currently has over 2,500 employees.

“Last December, we launched a new PhonePe ESOPs plan and issued Esops to 100 per cent of our employees across levels, functions and grades. All these employees will complete the one year cliff of their stock vesting next month, so it’s a great time to offer some liquidity to everyone,” PhonePe head of HR Manmeet Sandhu said while commenting on the rationale behind this buyback.

Sandhu added that almost 75 per cent of PhonePe’s current workforce is eligible to participate in the current buyback offer, and “for most it is the first time in their careers that they’ve either owned Esops or had a chance to liquidate them”.

It was in December last year that PhonePe launched its ESOPs programme, under which it allotted the instrument to all its 2,200 employees cumulatively, which is worth Rs 1,500 crore.

PhonePe has over 33.5 crore registered users in the country.

Using PhonePe, users can send and receive money, recharge mobile phones, make various kinds of payments, and invest in gold and silver. It ventured into financial services in 2017. PhonePe is also accepted at over 2.2 crore merchant outlets across the country.