India's very own e-commerce giant Flipkart has closed a $500-600 million fresh financing round led by its existing investors. On November 11 we reported that Flipkart is about to raise mega-funding and the funding could make Flipkart valuation close to $10 billion and now that Flipkart has finally raised funding much early than what speculated earlier, Flipkart's pre-money valuation has calculated at more than $10 billion today.
In this latest round of funding Tiger Global, South Africa's Naspers and Yuri Milner's DST Global, along with others, have pumped in $50-100 million each in the new round with a new investor chipping in a nominal amount.
The latest round of funding is the third fund-raise this year for the seven year old company.
Flipkart had in July this year raised $1 billion in funding - biggest ever by any Indian startups, by its existing investors Tiger Global and Naspers, with participations from GIC, one of the two sovereign wealth funds of Singapore, besides Accel Partners, DST Global, ICONIQ Capital, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Sofina. The July funding has mad founders of Flipkart - Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, as rich as Infosys co-founders
As per sources, the latest move was part of Flipkart's regular fund-raising plans till it readies itself to go public on the US stock market in the next 36 months. As reported by TOI, the e-commerce startup could raise anywhere between $2 billion and $3 billion within this time frame.
Flipkart claims that it had hit an annual revenue run rate of $1 billion in February this year and now it seeks to reach between $3 billion and $4 billion of sales in the current fiscal year.
Flipkart's rival Amazon is already invested $2 billion in its India operations whereas Japan's SoftBank recently invested more than $800 million in India. SoftBank's investments include Flipkart rival Snapdeal, the second-largest Indian e-commerce company, which raised $627 million in October.
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