Flipkart co-founder, Sachin Bansal, post exiting the e-commerce firm is long being mulling to start his second innings as an investor. A couple of months back it was speculated that Sachin is planning to raise a venture capital fund of up to $1 billion for investing in startups. Now the latest coming in this is that Sachin may invest $100 million in homegrown cab hailing firm Ola in what would be called as biggest investment in personal capacity, reported Samidha Sharma and Madhav Chanchani of Economic Times.
Sachin Bansal’s potential investment in Ola will be largely through subscription of new shares with a small component coming through a secondary sale by Ola’s existing investors, said the report.
Sachin Bansal have had collected around $1 billion by selling his entire 5.5% stake in Flipkart to Walmart and if he invests what is being speculated then this $100 Mn investmentwill constitute more than 10% of this $1 billion he pocketed from Flipkart sale.
Notably, Bansal and Aggarwal are very close to each other comparing any other founders of Indian startup ecosystem. In this year’s Time magazine’s Most influential people’s list when Bhavesh made it to the list SAchin Bansal had himself written Aggarwak’s profile for the magazine.
Besides, the duo from different companies came together publicly to voice concerns over how domestic Internet startups did not have a level-playing field with deep-pocketed global giants such as Amazon and Uber, which directly compete with Flipkart and Ola.
In October last year, Ola had raised $1.1 billion from China’s Tencent and existing investor SoftBank and that time the ride-hailing had stated that it would raise another $1 billion. Eventually, in August this year, the company managed to raise only $50 million from Hong Kong-based Sailing Capital and the China-Eurasian Economic Cooperation Fund (CEECF). Ola, in this funding round, was valued at $4.2 billion.
Since 2014, Sachin Bansal has been proactively investing in startups with investment size of $1-2 million. He has invested in about seven ventures with a combined total funding of $26 million in various startups including electric two-wheeler firm Ather Energy; SigTuple, a health-tech firm; Unacademy and Tracxn, the largest data platform of Startups, among others.
If the Ola deal goes through then this will be Sachin’s first investment after his exit from Flipkart.
Source: IndianWeb2
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