India's top 5 startup founders

Tech in Asia puts the spotlight on some of India's best startup founders

Sachin Bansal, Flipkart

Sachin Bansal started Flipkart in 2007 from a one-room apartment in Bangalore along with his schoolmate Binny Bansal. The store started by selling books online and later expanded to categories such as apparel and electronics.

Now valued at over $17 billion, Flipkart is amongst the top 10 ecommerce companies in the world. 

Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal

Kunal Bahl, along with his schoolmate Rohit Bansal experimented with various businesses over the course of four years before setting up Snapdeal as a discount coupons and daily deals site.

Kunal pivoted Snapdeal to conventional ecommerce in 2012, and business picked up from there.

Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola

Co-founded in 2010 by tech graduate Bhavish Aggarwal, Ola Cabs is the biggest online taxi and car aggregator in India today.

The transportation startup was founded in Mumbai and raised angel funds from Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl and Shaadi founder Anupam Mittal. Valued at over $5 billion now, Ola has about 250,000 cabs and auto rickshaws in its app, operational in about 85 Indian cities.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm

Vijay Shekhar Sharma launched One97 as a telecoms software company in the early 2000s and later pivoted it to Paytm, an online marketplace in 2009.

Paytm is now widely used for payments and mobile credit top-ups. The company last year raised about $700 million in capital from Ant Financial, the affiliate epayments division of Chinese ecommerce powerhouse Alibaba.

Pranay Chulet, Quikr

Pranay Chulet worked in consulting firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Booz Allen Hamilton, before starting Quikr. 

In 2007, Pranay started his first entrepreneurial venture, Excellere. In 2008, he founded Kijiji India, which was later rebranded as Quikr.

It’s now one of India’s largest online classifieds portals. 
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.