Sachin Bansal
Co-founder, Flipkart
BTech (Computer Science and Engineering), IIT Delhi
Photo: Mylittlefinger, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
About
Sachin Bansal co-founded Flipkart and now chairs Navi, the financial services group he set up after leaving the e-commerce company. Born in Chandigarh on 5 August 1981, he studied computer science and engineering at IIT Delhi, worked briefly at Techspan and joined Amazon in 2006. In October 2007 he and Binny Bansal, who is not a relative, started Flipkart as an online bookstore from an apartment in Koramangala, Bengaluru, with ₹4 lakh. He was chief executive from the start until 2016 and executive chairman from 2016 to 2018. When Walmart bought control of Flipkart in 2018 he sold his roughly 5.5% stake and left, agreeing to a non-compete. In December 2018 he founded BACQ Acquisitions, which became Navi Technologies, and in April 2020 Navi named him its managing director. Navi's board page says his focus is long-term strategy, technology and building scalable financial services systems. Bansal has since handed the chief executive role to Rajiv Naresh and serves as chairman and executive director.
Between Flipkart and Navi, Bansal became an active backer of other startups. In 2019 he put $100 million into Ola, and his early holdings included Ather Energy, GreyOrange, Inshorts and Unacademy. Navi bought the technology consultancy Maven Hive in December 2019 and the general insurance brand COCO from DHFL in 2020, and filed draft papers for a ₹3,350 crore IPO in March 2022. Time magazine named Sachin and Binny Bansal among its 100 most influential people in 2016, and he was the Economic Times Entrepreneur of the Year for 2012–13.
Source: en.wikipedia.org