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.
The Tech Portal is published by Blue Box Media Private Limited. Our investors have no influence over our reporting. Read our full Ownership and Funding Disclosure →
