Binny Bansal to Establish $400 Million Fund; VC Fund to Focus on Startups in India and Southeast Asia
Binny Bansal, Co-founder of Flipkart, is deciding to create a venture fund to uphold startups. The latest move has been taken after Bansal sold nearly $14 million shares in Flipkart to Tiger Global Management. The fund will have a corpus of around $300-400 million, according to a media report.
Flipkart Co-founder, Binny Bansal is firming up plans to launch a venture capital (VC) fund with a target corpus of $300-400 million, which will focus on startups who need growth capital, the daily news, The Economic Times reported citing two anonymous sources who were privy of the matter.
Bansal’s VC Fund will Focus on Startup Growth
Bansal has given up his role as CEO at Flipkart last year and since then, continued participating in the industry as an angel investor and also, heading a firm viz. xto 10x Technologies.
According to the cited media report, Bansal founded VC fund will be based out of Singapore. Further, he will be commissioned as a general partner administering the fund and will infuse money as an anchor investor. The VC fund will primarily concentrate on homegrown startups in India and also, shore up entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia.
“Bansal is likely to invest 10-20 per cent of the fund’s corpus and will start bringing on board other investors soon,” the daily news reported citing an anonymous source privy to the matter.
Additionally, the media report cited that other people can join the VC fund as financial backers.
Bansal has started working on his fund as he has lately employed former Flipkart Executive, Rajneesh Baweja to manage finance and legal work of the VC fund. Earlier this year, Bansal had relocated base of Bengaluru, India to Singapore.
Bansal’s transition from a technopreneur to venture capitalist is something rare to be seen in India. Such transition into investors is mostly witnessed in foreign markets namely China and Silicon Valley.
An Important Transition-from an Entrepreneur to Investor
There are not many stories unlike Binny Bansal, who switched his role from a technopreneur to an investor or venture capitalist. Some of the major transitions that happened in the past were of Avnish Bajaj and Suvir Sujan, co-founders of Bazee who later established investment companies, Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners separately.
Besides this, Fundamentum was established by Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and Sanjeev Aggarwal, Co-founder of Helion Venture Partners.
After exiting Flipkart, Bansal had joined xto 10x Technologies as a Chairman; the company was established by Saikiran Krishnamurthy, former Flipkart Executive and McKinsey consultant. The company renders consulting services and technology tools to startup companies. Apart from this, Bansal has made several investments in startups so far.
