Bengaluru: Flipkart is the remarkable story at the heart of India’s transformational start-up ecosystem. Some 11 years ago, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal set up Flipkart, a modest online bookstore in a two-bedroom apartment in Bengaluru's start up hub Koramangala.
Today, the Bengaluru-headquarted company has multiple offices across the country. A bulk of its operations are run out of a plush campus in the city that is spread over 8.3 lakh sq ft and houses 6,800 employees at the Embassy Tech Village on the IT city's Outer Ring Road. The duo met in 2005 at IIT-Delhi and had also worked at Amazon.
On Wednesday, a lion's share (77%) of Flipkart was lapped up by world’s largest retail chain, the $500 billion revenue Wal-Mart, for a whopping $16 billion, making the city bred company the rock star of Indian e-com startup story.
In October 2009, Accel Partners came on board of Flipkart with an investment of $1 million. American hedge fund Tiger Global joined the investor bandwagon by infusing $10 million. Flipkart raised a sizeable $1.4 billion from Tencent, eBay and Microsoft, while SoftBank Vision Fund brought in an additional $2.5 billion to its kitty in 2017.
It was also a landmark year for the e-retailer with it clocking a registered user base of 100 million. Flipkart now employs 33,000 people. It has over 100,000 registered sellers and 21 warehouse facilities across the country.
Currently, Kalyan Krishnamurthy is the CEO while Sachin is likely to leave the company and sell his stake.
