India’s e-commerce poster boy, Flipkart, is accumulating funds, at an extremely, extremely rapid pace. Just months after it raised a staggering $1 Billion, it has now raised a further $500-$600 million from existing investors, to be valued in the vicinity of $10 Billion.
As per a report in Times of India, the current funding round is lead by its existing investors. Tiger Global, Naspers and Yuri Milner’s DST Global, along with others, who have invested $50-100 million each in this new round of funding. They have also received funding from a new investor. This investement is a part of its regular plan before it gets ready to go public on US stock market in 2-3 years.
This is the third funding for the company in this year. Earlier in July, it raised $1 billion and in May, it raised $210 million. Tiger Global is the largest stake holder in the company with investment of over $700 million.
This round of funding, valuing Flipkart at $10 billion ranks it with the start-ups like Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb and Snapchat.
Flipkart has already hit the $3 billion revenue rate. It is further planning to reach to a wider range of audience with its exclusive tie-ups with brands. Flipkart earlier acquired India’s largest online fashion store, Myntra, which further helped it to consolidate a weakened position in the fashion business.
With India’s rapidly evolving internet scene, e-commerce start-ups are competing cut-throat, to get the most of this evolving Indian audience. Further fuelling this competition are foreign investors, which are inesting huge sums if money in Indian internet start-ups.
Japan-based SoftBank’s investment of over $600 Million in Snapdeal is a recent example of how foreign investors are backing Indian start-ups, with overwhelming confidence, even though these e-retail businesses are yet to operate in profits.
