Rajan Bajaj, who founded fintech unicorn Slice, took home just Rs 12 as annual salary in FY23. Compare this to FirstCry CEO Supam Maheshwari's Rs 200.7-crore remuneration in the same period, revealed a report.
PrivateCircle Research, a private market intelligence platform, released the report on the median and average salary gaps in unicorn founders, with Maheshwari and Bajaj being outliers.
Notably, Slice had reported Rs 847-crore revenue from its operations in payments and lending business during FY23, a three-fold jump over the previous fiscal. The company had managed to achieve this despite the regulatory clampdown that saw the company scrapping its then flagship product, a revolving creditline on prepaid card, during the first quarter of FY23.
The report also mentioned that Maheshwari’s monthly salary dropped by 49 percent in the first three quarters of FY24, as per the company’s revised draft red herring prospectus. His total remuneration was reduced to Rs 77.5 crore. Moneycontrol reported earlier that Maheshwari offloaded 6.2 million shares in the company in 10 days prior to filing for an initial public offer in December.
As per the report, the median salary of female unicorn founders was almost 44 percent lower than that of their male counterparts at Rs 1 crore as against Rs 1.8 crore in FY23.
Unicorn is a term used in the venture capital industry to describe a startup that is valuеd at $1 billion or more.
On average, male founders earned eight times their female peers, the report said.
On a list of 114 unicorns chosen for the analysis of records, the median founder salary for media and entertainment sector unicorns was as high as Rs 3.5 crore in FY23, followed by Rs 1.9 crore for logistics unicorns, and Rs 1.6 crore for edtech firms.
The analysis also found that logistics unicorns at the top with Rs 12.4 crore average salary which could be because of some outliers as the median is much lower for the sector. The median salary of a unicorn founder in FY22 was Rs 1.2 crore and around Rs 90 lakh in FY20 and FY21.
The gender disparity in the Indian startup ecosystem can also be estimated by the lack of women directors at unicorns, the report pointed out. In a March 2024 analysis, PrivateCircle found that 57 Indian unicorns have zero women on their board.
Salaries also differed in terms of location. Unicorn founders in Pune have the highest average and median salary of Rs 20 crore and Rs 3.7 crore among the top six cities, including Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad and Mumbai, the report showed. Pune's average has shot up because of Maheshwari's remuneration, it added.
The analysis is based on managerial remunerations disclosed in the companies’ MCA filings. PrivateCircle Research noted that it could not access founder salaries of foreign registered companies, which was the case for many SaaS companies.
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