India's e-commerce giant Flipkart has raised over $1 billion (Rs 6,000 crore) of fresh funding, reported Economic Times and this is the biggest fund-raising by an Indian e-commerce company ever. The company will announce the news of its funding in a week or two.
Half of the funding amount will come from existing investors Tiger Global, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner's DST Global and Accel Partners while the rest will come from several new investors. As per sources, the interested investors who wants to invest in Flipkart are - Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and US based investment firm T Rowe Price.
With this new funding round Flipkart has raised over $1.7 billion funds and company's valuation is now over $5 billion. Flipkart surely became India's leading e-commerce company among billion dollar club of India.
The fresh Flipkart funding is not biggest in India but globally as well for year 2014 and the highest been Silicon Valley-based startup Uber who earlier raised $1.2 billion of funding, Flipkart is just second to it in worldwide funding. This brings out the Indian startup ecosystem to global limelight and investors will surely eye towards Indian startups from this time onwards.
The new funding will boost Flipkart to compete with global e-commerce giant Amazon and India's homegrown e-commerce comany Snapdeal. Notably Amazon has biggest inventory of products and got deep pockets comparing to Indian e-commerce companies. The whooping $1 billion funding will surely give Flipkart confidence to stand against Amazon in India's online market.
Earlier in May this year, Flipkart raised $210 million from Yuri Milner’s DST Global and its existing investors Tiger Global, Naspers and Iconiq Capital.
Recently, Flipkart has acquired Myntra.com, another major online fashion store of India and the acquisition was an estimated INR 2,000 crore deal and also crossed $1 billion in sales in March this year.
It was also highly speculated that Flipkart was in negotiations to raise at least $500 million, for a likely listing in the US for 2016.
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