India’s unicorns club including Flipkart, Snapdeal, MakeMyTrip, Naukri, Ola and more is playing major role in shaping and strengthening of the Indian start-up ecosystem by producing a new startups army. Ex-employees of these companies have spawned more than 700 start-ups till date. According to Tracxn, a venture and startup data tracker firm, there are a number of notable ventures founded by the former employees of India’s unicorns. Numerous of these startups have succeeded to create big firms and contributing in shaping the Indian start-up ecosystem. They are succeeding the way of Infosys and Wipro which provide a strong support system to their employees to found startups. Remarkably, Infosys has created 867 companies and Wipro created 685 companies till date and most of them are serving in the Indian software services space.

Indian unicorns, in which Flipkart, in particular is responsible for creating many other entrepreneurs who left them to establish their own ventures. Prior to starting up, the experience and knowledge they gained during working in these companies nurtured their entrepreneurial spirit and helped in building a successful business. Let’s have a look on few startup names which are formed from former employees of Flipkart.

Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal founded Flipkart in 2007, when they were working for Amazon. They left the job to start their own venture in the form of Flipkart.com. Following the footsteps of Bansals’, a number of their employees, who left since its incorporation, have founded more than 60-70 start-ups.

Notable Startups from Ex-Employees-turned-Entrepreneurs of Flipkart


[caption id="attachment_115910" align="aligncenter" width="700"]Flipkart Ex-Employee Startups Pic Credit - Nishant@Flickr[/caption]

Two of Flipkart’s ex-employees -- Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori left to launch CureFit, a healthcare and fitness venture. This is Mukesh Bansal’s 2nd venture at entrepreneurship after Myntra, which merged to Flipkart in 2014. Like Bansal’s and Nagori’s, an increasing number of employees of Flipkart are taking path of entrepreneurship to give wings to their own ideas and thoughts.

Akshay Lal co-founded Playment a micro task crowd sourcing platform in 2015. It has tied up with existing e-commerce players including Flipkart, Paytm, Myntra to help them in assigning their tasks through crowd sourcing. It offers data collection, tagging, testing, analysis, algorithm training and market research services to e-commerce companies.

Another Flipkart’s ex-employee Arpit Dave co­-founded food ordering startup Runnr with an aim to become one among leading on-demand hyper local delivery carrier in the country. Its key team members also include ex-Amazon and ex-Ola employees. Ex- employees’ trio- Amod Malviya, Vaibhav Gupta and Sujeet Kumar founded Udaan, as an effective mode to connect wholesalers, manufacturers, retailers and traders of different categories.

Sameer Nigam quit Flipkart’s head of product job to start PhonePe an Internet venture to carry payment segment. The startup eventually got acquired by Flipkart, last year in April.

Working with Flipkart motivated Preeti Jain to start InLogg - a logistic company. Like them, Flipkart nurtured entrepreneurial thoughts of other employees too and about 50-60 of them now have their own ventures. Not only Flipkart’s former employees quit to starting their ventures but other unicorns too fed their employees minds to move toward entrepreneurship. Likewise, startups include; Urban Ladder, Housejoy and lots others which were started by the people who was hungry to learn more and desired for growth by exploring right market opportunities.

A High Rate of Shutdowns


Of course, the number of startups founded by ex-employees of unicorn startups has increased but many of these ventures have shut down shops within 1 or 2 years of starting. The shut down rate of these startups is very high because of the Indian startup ecosystem challenges which makes difficult for startups to survive for a long run. Only handful startups succeed to stay alive in the challenging startup ecosystem. A couple of them are victims of stereotype working, unrealistic valuation and easy money that forced them shutting down early.

For few others, funding was a big problem. Abhishek Goyal, co-founder, Tracxn said, "Less than 10% of start-ups manage to convince an institutional investor to invest capital in their companies. Less than 3% manage to reach Series B stage. So, building and scaling business is exceptionally hard. So we can continue to see a fair mix of successes and failures, and potentially success after multiple failed attempts."

Also Read -- Over 200 Startups Shut Down In 2016 which is 50% more than 2015

At last, despite the fact that many startups fail, this is great news that more number of startups founded by former employees of successful startups are witnessing the rapid growth and playing key role in countries entrepreneurial ecosystem. This leads to a highly competitive atmosphere, more innovations and improved technologies in the future.

[Top-Featured Image - Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay@Flickr ]
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