Ever since his unceremonious exit from Flipkart post the Walmart deal in May, there have been several narratives around how Sachin Bansal is going to make a fresh re-entry into the entrepreneurial world.
The latest report says that the co-founder and former CEO of Flipkart has a sharp focus on agritech and fintech segments to lay the foundation for the impending comeback.
According to the report, Sachin Bansal plans on setting up a holding entity to carry out the operations enabling him to head the subsidiaries in aforementioned segments, as well as make major and minor investments in these areas.
Bansal has apparently called in Ankit Agarwal, until recently the director at Bank of America, a batchmate from IITD, to be a partner and founding employee of this enterprise. The exact timing for the plan to actualize isn’t certain yet.
As far as the market is concerned, currently fintech is one of the hottest segments from the point of view of investment and opportunity. On the other hand, while agritech might not be explicitly popular, it offers immense opportunities to SaaS and IoT based startups. Henceforth, it becomes a segment with high potential for investment.
When Bansal had taken an exit from Flipkart in May by selling 5 per cent of his stake to Walmart (which had acquired 77 per cent stake overall in the firm for $16 billion) he had made $1 billion out of that deal. Post tax deduction, Sachin Bansal had carried around $750-760 million home in his pocket.
Within three months of his exit, the ex-CEO of Flipkart had been in headlines for planning to raise a $1 billion startup focused fund, with a keen interest in AI blockchain and drone startups. He was planning to contribute 40 per cent to the fund in his own capacity.
Later in September, it was reported that he had shown a keen interest in Ola. He was eyeing to invest around $100 million in the mobility firm which is now risen to $150 million, via acquiring both fresh shares and existing shares of Tiger Global. If finalized this would be the largest investment in personal capacity in the Indian startup ecosystem ever.
So far Sachin Bansal has invested around $26 million in startups like Unacademy, Inshorts, Ather Energy, SpoonJoy and few others.
If nothing, all these reports certainly go on to prove how exits are beneficial for the startup ecosystem itself when the money gained by the exiting party is most likely to flow back into the system.
Going further, it would be interesting to see how the second innings of Bansal with startups pan out.
This development was first reported by ET.
