How Walmart’s Buy of Flipkart in $16 Billion Will Change the Startup Map of India!
Binny Bansal and Sachin, who are the founders of Flipkart, have invested in the startup which is unrelated to the venture which started by selling of books online and which was sold the last week to retail giant Walmart. The Bengaluru based firm had been valued in just shy of $21 billion. The three main examples of both of these founders are Artificial Intelligence driven health tech firm from Sigtuple, biotech startup Pandorum and electric scooter maker Ather.
Binny and Sachin might get a big support from these investment through surfing the next wave of entrepreneurship in India. And according to the experts it is said that this wave of entrepreneurship in India will be stimulated by bold business ideas that look the further side of ecommerce market as far as we know, and heavy investors are building around the areas away from the moats like hospitality, fashion and aggregation. Now around the areas which are emerging, the entrepreneurship will focus on those, such as business-to-business venture companies with specialized focus or homegrown brands. Some of the examples where the experts points to are ready-to-cok brand ID, B2B pplatform Udaan, juice brand raw Pressery and seller of branded tea Chai Point. Other platform that could gain are education, fashion and healthcare.
Watershed Moment
From the sale of Flipkart, the good returns has lit up the market indeed, which was set up in a flat in Bengaluru a decade ago. A group CEO and an executive chairman Binny Bansal said that this is a watershed moment in India for startup and also said that a day was announced after $16 billion. According to the industry estimate, the combination of Amazon and Flipkart-Walmart have got 80% of India’s ecommerce market. Doesn’t matter how lucrative the idea is, but this fact has made the industry watchers to realize the duality in ecommerce, may be losing preposition. Founder of MoneyTap, Bala Parthasarathy, which is a consumer lending platform, says that if you timber another ecommerce idea to investor, you might be out of the room laughing badly. After the viability of new segments and funding revives, it looks like a natural progress that the entrepreneurs are searching beyond ecommerce.
The domination of ecommerce space by Flipkart and Amazon and Paytm fuelled by Alibaba in the market has now become a common wisdom for investors to show their interest in shifting to ideas away from the area. “The time for horizontal ecommerce is done,” says Samir Kumar, managing director of Inventus Partners, an early stage investor in Bengaluru. “Entrepreneurs need to target newer opportunities in segments around IoT, machine learning and consumer brands, and we’re seeing growing interest in verticals like healthcare and education.” He points to ventures he’s backed that are barely a couple of years old, like Tricog and Movensync, as examples of this shift in entrepreneurial interest.
