Binny Bansal, co-founder of India’s e-commerce behemoth Flipkart, has sold Flipkart shares worth $76 million (Rs 531 crore) to Walmart’s Luxembourg based subsidiary arm, according to business intelligence platform Paper.vc. This has brought Bansal’s stake in the Walmart owned company from 3.85% to 3.52%.
Bansal had already offloaded a part of his minority stake at the time of Walmart’s historic takeover last year. The offloading helped in swelling the bank account of Bansal, who today along with Sachin Bansal are among the most prolific investors in India’s startup ecosystem. His rapidly increasing investment portfolio includes worthy bets like AI startup Spotdraft, healthtech venture and Niramai – a learning platform dedicated to developers.
Bansal also started his own startup venture xto10x Technologies last year. This new venture aims to provide unique tech tools and learning platform to help startups to rapidly scale up their business.
With this marginal offloading, Flipkart co-founder may possible once again renew his investment pursuit and this obviously spells good news for the entire startup ecosystem.
As per the contract with Walmart, Bansal has the right to pare down more than half of his stake by August next year. Economic Times, after quoting unidentified sources, claims that he plans to raise almost $400 Mn from this.
Bansal had to resign from his group CEO and chairman position at Flipkart last year, following an internal probe into his alleged misconduct with a female employee. His resignation expectedly sent shockwaves across the Indian corporate world. But Bansal continues to deny the charges and maintains that he is completely innocent.
As things stand today, Bansal seems to have moved ahead following his dramatic exit from a company he and his partner Sachin Bansal had started from a small Bengaluru apartment almost a decade ago.