Flipkart's Bansals are officially out of the billionaire club

Net worth may have dropped to $870 mn after Flipkart's latest funding

Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal are no longer a part of the billionaire club after the company closed a $1.4-billion funding round.

The two men, in their mid-thirties, became India’s first start-up billionaires after Flipkart closed a $700-million round, at a valuation of $15.2 billion, in July 2015. Forbes had then reported they owned 7.5 per cent each in the company, making each of them worth $1.15 billion.

However, with Flipkart’s latest funding round seeing its valuation drop by a little over 23 per cent to $11.6 billion, and if the shareholding of each founder hasn’t changed, their net worth will drop to around $870 million. 

Considering that the company was forced to go in for a fresh funding round, the founders’ shareholding is likely to have been diluted further. Hence, it’s clear they are out of the billionaire club.

The Bansals were dropped from the Hurun Global Rich List for Indian billionaires in March. Both Sachin and Binny were part of the list in 2016 but the mark-downs by mutual funds had forced them out of the list.

Though their net worth might have fallen, the Flipkart founders continue to have significant wealth through their shareholding in the company. However, the same cannot be said about them retaining control of their company, where they’ve been pushed to non-operational roles after their largest investor, Tiger Global, brought Kalyan Krishnamurthy in to run the show.