BANGALORE: The Bansals of Flipkart — Sachin and Binny — now boast of a combined net worth in excess of $1 billion, inching closer to that of Bangalore’s iconic tech billionaires N R Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys.
The fresh $1-billion fund raise values the Bansals’ combined stake of approximately 15% at over Rs 6,000 crore. The four-member Murthy family has a net worth of around Rs 8,700 crore in India’s second largest IT services company, while the Nilekani family’s net worth stands at Rs 6,500 crore.
Consumer internet ventures have been getting fabulous valuations. The US and Chinese internet markets have fostered many billionaire entrepreneurs as their ventures went public. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of $33 billion, while Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma has a $12.5 billion net worth, up $8.9 billion year-to-date, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The Bansals, who are not related, have a higher net worth than Infosys’ co-founder and outgoing CEO S D Shibulal, who along with his family holds shares worth Rs 4,300 crore in the company. Infosys’ other co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan’s family has a net worth of around Rs 6,500 crore, as of Tuesday.
“On paper the Bansals personal wealth is a great story, but we will have to wait for a listing to see their actual net worth,” said an investment banker who did not want to be named.
Infosys is now into its fourth decade and has a market cap of about $30 billion. Flipkart’s $7 billion valuation story has been scripted in just seven years, and the Bansals are now talking of creating a $100-billion e-commerce company.
From 2011 to 2014, Flipkart grew its sales from $10 million to an annualized $2 billion, an over 100 times growth in three years. There is a huge revolution in e-commerce in India, with the future of retailing coming from the internet, said the Bansals while announcing their latest fund raise. The Bansals believe that in the next 10 years, India would have several $100 billion companies in the internet space. “Flipkart is much bigger today than we or our investors had ever imagined,” Sachin Bansal said.
