Largest Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart has raised a total of $1.4 billion from Tencent, eBay, and Microsoft. After this funding, the company is valued at $11.6 billion. Flipkart’s earlier investors Tiger Global Management, Naspers Group, Accel Partners and DST Global also participated in this round.
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“We have chosen these partners based on their long histories of pioneering industries, and the unique expertise and insights each of them brings to Flipkart,” said Flipkart founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal.
Flipkart also shared the investment timeline that shows how long this company has gone in past 10 years. Founded back in 2007, Flipkart is an online shopping retailer that sells products and is competing with Amazon India in its home market. Microsoft’s involvement in this round of funding came as a surprise, but it shows that Flipkart is doing much better than media reported few weeks back.
Along with this round of funding, Flipkart has also acquired India business of eBay.
The eBay was also the part of this funding round and it did a strategic commercial agreement with Flipkart. For the equity stake in Flipkart, eBay has made cash investment and sold its eBay.in business to Flipkart.
After this deal, eBay.in will still continue to operate as an independent entity. eBay and Flipkart have also signed an exclusive cross-border trade agreement. So, customers of Flipkart will gain access to wide range of eBay inventory and eBay’s customers will get access to unique Indian inventory sold by Flipkart sellers.
