The price band of Brainbees Solutions Ltd, which runs an omnichannel children’s clothing enterprises under the FirstCry brand, has been fixed in the range of ₹440 to ₹465 per equity share of the face value of ₹2. The company has sought a value of $2.9 billion and the IPO comprises a fresh issue of ₹1,666 crore, and an offer-for-sale (OFS) of up to 54 million shares.

FirstCry’s top executives are sitting on a stockpile value of ₹2,227 crore of which the founding team comprising Supam Maheshwari (CEO), Amitava Saha (former COO), Sanket Hattimtatur (chief of staff) and Prashant Jadhav (CTO) alone are worth ₹2,127 crore. The values have been calculated based on the lower end of the price band.

The rest of the executives were granted stock options over the years, through the company’s employee stock ownership plan (Esop) policy. FirstCry has a vesting period of 4 years with an exercise life of 10 years.

Senior employees such as Ajoy Kumar Kar (VP operations) will make ₹4.5 crore, Amitabh Sadasiv (store operations manager) ₹1.32 crore, Anirudh Chaturvedi (CPO) ₹14.93 crore. Arpit Agarwal (VP – Merchandising), Megha Arora (AVP – home brands & imports) and Shwetank Gupta (VP – Stockists Business ) cumulatively are sitting on a stock pile worth ₹8.89 crore.

Several investors including Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd, Schroders Capital, NewQuest and SVF Frog (Cayman) Ltd are expected to make windfall gains from the IPO. Mahindra’s average cost of acquiring FirstCry’s shares was ₹77.96 and Schroders’ ₹145.26. NewQuest and SVF’s average acquisition cost was ₹133.69 and ₹154.40 apiece, respectively.

“Seeing FirstCry and other new age startups filing papers for an IPO has given renewed hope to the startup ecosystem after a rather lacklustre few years for startups in the public markets,” said Natasha Treasurywala, partner at Desai & Diwanji. She added that investors are looking at IPOs of sustainable business models with slow but steady growth trajectory to be far more attractive than immediate profitability.

Other investors including Premji Invest, private equity firm Chrys Capital’s Apricot Investments and Sage Investment Trust, which have an average cost of acquisition of ₹280.87 per share are also set to book big profits. Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan’s family office Pratithi Investment Trust (average cost of acquisition: ₹312.48) and Asian Paints non-executive vice-chairman Manish Mahendra Choksi’s family office Satyadharma Investments ( ₹196.38) are among the other investors.

FirstCry intends to utilize the net proceeds for lease payments, investments in the subsidiary and for expenditure related to the establishment of a new, contemporary facility and a warehouse in India. The company also looks to support activities relating to sales and marketing, technology and data science, including expenses associated with cloud and server hosting; financing inorganic expansion through acquisition and other strategic initiatives. In FY24, Brainbees operating revenues rose 15% to ₹6,481 crore, and its losses narrowed by 34% to ₹321 crore from a year ago.