Inducement Awards After an Acquisition: Strike and Closing Vesting
Check the strike price, closing-vesting tranche, remaining schedule, and plan exception in an inducement grant to see what you keep after an acquisition.
The trap: the old grant may be gone
If your company is bought and you receive an inducement award, your old equity may not survive the deal. The new grant letter is the document that decides what you keep going forward. Do not assume the new RSU or option package is a conversion of what you already held. Treat it as a separate grant. The deal documents decide whether the old grant was canceled, converted, or left alone.
An inducement grant is usually a hiring or retention award issued after a transaction. It can be an RSU, which becomes shares when it vests, or an option, which gives you the right to buy shares at a set price. The word inducement signals that the company is using a special plan to bring people in. The grant letter can look like a normal equity award but carry different timing.
The rule: read the new grant like a CFO
Read the strike, the closing tranche, and the remaining schedule. Those three lines tell you what you actually keep. On options, the strike price is your cost. The closing tranche vests when the deal closes. The remaining schedule keeps you working.
Strike price matters most when the option is close to the market price. If the strike is below the grant-date market price, the option has built-in value. If it is above, you need the stock to climb before the option pays. RSUs do not have a strike, but they still have a vesting date that can move your value.
Aegerion Pharmaceuticals' Rule 5635(c)(4) inducement plan targeted people who were not already employees or non-employee directors, or who had a genuine period of non-employment. Fortrea's inducement grant to CFO Jason Knoblauch included 106,755 PSUs, performance-based units, and 144,434 RSUs, with the awards subject to earlier vesting on a change of control or certain termination events.
Keep this checklist next to the grant letter. Each item is a one-minute check.
- Find the strike or exercise price, and compare it to the grant-date closing price if the letter shows it.
- Find the closing-vesting tranche: the number of shares or units that vest at closing, and the closing date.
- Find the remaining vesting schedule: the first vesting date, the installment frequency, and the end date.
- Find the plan exception: the inducement plan name and the rule citation.
Use the first item to check cost, the second to see what is already yours, the third to see what you must earn, and the fourth to confirm the inducement track.
Public grants show the same lines
Ondas purchased Insignito, Ottopia Defense, and Caribou Labs for an initial $56 million. It created acquisition-related inducement awards for 37 newly hired employees: 2,979,063 RSUs and 80,000 options with a $7.72 strike. The awards were issued under the Ondas Inc. 2026 Inducement Plan, using the Nasdaq Rule 5635(c)(4) inducement exception, a special hiring-grant track.
890,275 of the 2,979,063 inducement RSUs become vested when the acquisitions close. For the 1,866,061 RSUs, one-third vests on September 23, 2027, followed by eight equal quarterly installments. The 222,727 RSUs vest over two years in eight equal quarterly installments after the closing date. For the 80,000 options, one-third vests on September 23, 2027, followed by 24 equal monthly installments.
PTC Therapeutics approved 51,270 options and 37,995 RSUs for 37 new employees on September 22, 2026. It set the exercise price for its September 22, 2026 inducement options at $65.96 per share, equal to the closing price on the grant date. The options carried a 10-year term, with one-quarter vesting one year after each employee's start date and 6.25% vesting in every following quarterly period.
SCYNEXIS granted a new Senior Director 20,000 stock options at a $5.26 exercise price on August 24, 2026, with 25% vesting on the one-year anniversary and the balance vesting monthly over 36 months. Health Catalyst's inducement grant to Simeon Kohl included 2,747,385 RSUs, of which 915,975 vest on September 14, 2027 and the rest vest in eight quarterly installments.
If the letter is silent on the old grant, ask for the deal documents. If it is silent on earlier vesting, ask for the plan.
