Flipkart to raised about $1.4bn in new funding round

By shubhamagarwal

Posted on April 10, 2017

Few weeks ago, Flipkart, eCommerce market, made the headlines for all kinds of business troubles. The management left, followed by a fundraising crunch. Since Flipkart owns fashion retailers like Myntra and Jabong and payments app called PhonePe, it decided to raise funds. Originally, Flipkart decided on raising between $500 million and $1 billion. However, it raised about $1.4 billion.

In the fresh funding round, Flipkart raised funds around $1 billion. Later this was increased to  $1.2 billion and finally to $1.5 billion in a new round. After raising funds of $1.5 billion,  Flipkart would get the pre-money valuation of $11.6 billion before the end of next week. This is the largest fundraising ever made by any Indian start-up Company. Flipkart’s fundraising came from various investors that have a valuation of $10-12 billion. These Companies include eBay, Paypal, Tencent, and Microsoft.

Flipkart proposed to buy India’s online marketplace eBay, but that would take the time to materialise. Flipkart is discussing with Japan’s  SoftBank to acquire or merge with Snapdeal. After Snapdeal is acquired by Flipkart, Tiger Global Management, the largest shareholder, would sell stakes to SoftBank. Apparently, the Tiger Global Company has invested about $1 billion in Flipkart over the past eight years. Also,  the Tiger Global Company presently holds around 30-33% eCommerce retailer.  In addition,  Flipkart is busy talking with Google Capital for the ongoing round. Also, two other financial investors have shown interest in investing in Flipkart.

At present,  Flipkart under the leadership of a new CEO, Kalyan Krishnamurthy is aiming to make large funds. Kalyan Krishnamurthy’s experience at eBay and Tiger Global is helping Flipkart eCommerce market. On Monday (3rd April 2017), Microsoft and Flipkart announced a cloud partnership. Flipkart would begin using Microsoft Azure, the public cloud, and the platform. The advantage of the platform is the online marketplace analysis present in the servers. Also, Microsoft’s AI tools help Flipkart to provide customers with better recommendations. Moreover,  Azure platform having a global scale would allow consistent, continuous growth and expansion. Both Microsoft and Flipkart are hoping there would be an increase of 500 million customers in 10 years.

Flipkart to raised about $1.4bn in new funding round