Flipkart co-founder, Binny Bansal, plans to invest in startups with his Venture Capital fund that he is planning to set up. The tech entrepreneur turns investor plans to launch the VC with a target corpus of $300-400 million. Bansal, who resigned from his post at Flipkart the previous year, is likely to set up the funding by the end of this year and will be based out of Singapore. The VC will focus on new businesses in India that require capital growth but will also be backing up entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia. Bansal will be running the fund as a General Partner (GP) and will also serve as the anchor investor.
A source told TOI, ” Bansal Bansal is likely to invest 10-20% of the fund’s corpus and will start bringing on board other investors soon.” He added that a set of investors could be a fund of funds and family offices joining in as anchor investors.
The investor has already started setting up a team which includes the former Flipkart executive Rajneesh Baweja. Bansal’s step to turn into a full-time investor which seems to be a rare transition for India is more common for mature startup ecosystems like the Silicon Valley and China.
Some other Entrepreneur turns Investor of India
Many of the top entrepreneurs of India, such as Myntra’s Mukesh Bansal & Freecharge founder Kunal Shah, have moved on to start their own companies, despite being active angel investors. Even Sachin Bansal, Binny’s co-founder, has been using his $1 billion Flipkart fortune to initiate BACQ, a financial services company. Beside BACQ, he has also made a couple of personal investments, such as $100 million in nation’s largest cab service, Ola.
Some past major entrepreneurs to turn into professional investors were Baazee co-founders Suvir Sujan & Avnish Bajaj, who went ahead to co-found Nexus Venture Partners & Matrix Partners India respectively. Infosys co-founder, Nandan Nilekani set up Fundamentum in 2017 along with Sanjeev Aggarwal, Senior Managing Director at Helion Venture Partners.
Binny Bansal after Flipkart
Binny Bansal, after his resignation from Flipkart, invested and acted as the executive chairman at xto10x Technologies. The platform offers tools, learning, and counseling services to startups in the growth stage. Binny has been making personal investments in startups for the past five years. Some of the other deals he has done recently include $25 million in a new age insurance startup Acko and has participated in a $140 million round of warehouse robotics startup GreyOrange along with other sponsors.
He also anchored several VC funds including 021 Capital which was started by his former financial advisor Sailesh Tulshan. He has also invested in some other firms like health-tech startup SigTuple, supply chain startup Increff, fashion label House of Masaba, legal tech startup Spotdraft, and digital insurance company Acko. Bansal’s current state in Flipkart is around 3% currently.
