IIT placements bring startups into a hiring war with the bigwigs, who wins?

At IIT placements, venture-backed startups like Razorpay, Fractal Analytics, Battery Smart, OYO, Navi, Meesho and SpeakX are aggressively competing with tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia, as well as high-frequency trading (HFT) firms, to secure top engineering talent.​​

While startups have long recruited from IITs—Flipkart alone extended over 100 offers across campuses for the 2014 batch—they are now more assertive, often sharing prime slots with established players and HFT majors as many edge toward initial public offering (IPOs). Mint's review of their job descriptions to the IITs shows that these firms lure candidates with stocks, bonuses, rapid career growth, and generous Esops that promise quicker rewards than slower paths at legacy companies.

Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal's Navi is among the major recruiters from the IITs this season. Bansal, an alumnus of IIT Delhi and the poster boy of Indian startups, is seeking to hire for multiple roles in fintech, offering salaries in the range of ₹38.2-45.2 lakh, along with additional perks including bonuses, relocation allowances, and Esops.

In response to Mint’s queries, Subeer Bakshi, group head of HR at Navi, said the company is hiring from IITs this year and is present on all major campuses, including IIT Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Roorkee, Guwahati, and Hyderabad.

Navi also hired IIT interns from the 2026 batch, though pre-placement offers decisions are still pending. Bakshi said median salaries have increased this year, with performance-linked pay and Esops remaining central to its compensation structure.

“We continue to maintain a compensation structure that is both performance-linked and wealth-aligned through Esops, ensuring long-term incentives remain a core part of how we attract and retain talent."

Talent shortage

Razorpay is scouting for software engineers to join its Bengaluru office. Founded by IIT Roorkee alumni Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, the IPO bound fintech major is expected to offer around ₹20 lakh in compensation, along with a joining bonus of ₹3 lakh and ₹20 lakh of Esops with a vesting period of four years. The company declined to comment on Mint's emailed queries.

SpeakX, an over 1-year-old edutech startup in its current form, made its IIT hiring debut this year but struggled to close top candidates despite increasing compensation. The English learning platform is expected to hire backend software engineers for its Gurugram office and may offer ₹10 lakh joining bonus and ₹10 lakh Esops alongside its compensation.

“Upwards of ₹50 lakh CTC, including Esops," the company said, adding that “even that isn’t competitive with the top-paying recruiters." The company, however, managed to secure a slot on Day Zero.

Still, many of the top 20 students at IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur had “either backed out or were already placed," and some didn’t turn up despite clearing the online test.

The company eventually hired five engineers, but said interest in early-stage startups was stronger at the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs). “The enthusiasm for startups is much higher at NITs and IIITs than at IITs." With AI now writing “70% of our code internally," SpeakX said companies increasingly need fewer but exceptional hires.

“We had to raise our comp(ensation) bands…If you want to play in that league, there’s no other way. But because we hire fewer people, the cost structure balances out."

IPO lure

Battery swapping firm Battery Smart, founded by Pulkit Khurana and Siddharth Sikka, IIT Kanpur alumni, may also offer postings in its Gurugram office to data analysts and strategy and operations associates against ₹25 lakh, inclusive of ₹2 lakh of performance bonus, ₹1 lakh of joining bonus and Esops worth ₹7 lakh.

“At Battery Smart, IITs continue to be a key talent pool as we scale the next phase of India’s EV transition. This placement season, we’re hiring across product, technology, supply chain, and operations from select campuses," Nitasha Sharma, talent acquisition director, said.

To attract top talent in a competitive landscape, Battery Smart focuses on more than compensation, she added. “We offer a well-rounded compensation package comprising fixed salary, performance-based incentives, and long-term value through Esops. Beyond competitive roles and career progression, we offer a culture where innovation, autonomy, and purpose come together, and the chance to help shape a category-defining business from the ground up."

While more traditional firms use Esops, bonuses and clawbacks to retain employees and prevent them from exiting early, as Mint reported on Tuesday, for IPO-bound startups, it is a way to attract candidates to the firm. Of the 23 IITs, the newer ones, along with some other major engineering colleges, including NITs, began their placements in September, before the older IITs.

Mumbai-based artificial intelligence and analytics firm Fractal Analytics, which is also exploring an upcoming IPO, is seeking AI engineers for its Mumbai, Gurugram, and Bengaluru offices. The company may offer a salary of ₹35 lakh, accompanied by a retention bonus of ₹3 lakh after 13 months, with a 12-month clawback period. The firm declined to comment on queries shared by Mint.

Retention tool

IPO-bound OYO Rooms is seeking candidates to join its leadership programme in Gurugram and can offer a salary of around ₹11.5 lakh. Similarly, Meesho, too, has multiple openings with a likely compensation range of ₹37.25-60 lakh, ahead of its IPO. “A majority of our hires are technology folks. About 57% of our entire headcount is tech and product. So our focus would be just to get the best talent there within technology," Vidit Aatrey, co-founder and CEO of the multi-category online retailer, told Mint in an interview.

Razorpay and OYO’s Esops could become more attractive as their IPO timelines draw closer, something both companies are counting on to stand out.

Queries sent to OYO Rooms on Tuesday morning remain unanswered.

The demand for Esops is increasingly coming from students themselves, not just from startups trying to make their offers more attractive, said Aditya Singh, co-founder and partner at venture capital firm All in Capital.

He said that students see Esops as real ownership in the company, but it is important for them to understand the terms clearly. Unlike big-tech restricted stock units (RSUs) offered by companies such as Amazon or Google, most startup Esops require employees to buy their shares before exercising them, and the options only have value if the stock becomes liquid through an IPO or other exit. “If the company never lists, the Esops may not translate into meaningful financial gain," he said.

RSUs are a retention tool where employees are granted a fixed number of shares after a specified period, provided they fulfil performance criteria.

Still, Singh said, the trend is positive. In simple terms, early-stage valuations benefit from strong teams, whereas late-stage valuations are driven primarily by financial metrics.

Placements at IIT are a barometer of how campus recruitments in India will shape up over the next few months. The older IITs—Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Kharagpur, Kanpur, Roorkee, and Guwahati—started their final placements from the early hours of 1 December.

High-frequency trading companies, including Da Vinci Trading, tech giants Tesla Inc. and Apple Inc., and aircraft makers Airbus and Boeing, are among the companies that will clash to win the best engineering talent, Mint reported on Monday.