Binny Bansal offloads $76 million worth Flipkart shares to Walmart arm

Bansal, one of the poster boys of the Indian startup industry, had sold a small portion of his minority holding while keeping a 3.85% stake when Walmart bought Flipkart in 2018.

MUMBAI|NEW DELHI: A year after Walmart acquired the business he co-founded, Binny Bansal sold more shares in online retailer Flipkart to its new owner.

Bansal, one of the poster boys of the Indian startup industry, had sold a small portion of his minority holding while keeping a 3.85% stake when Walmart bought Flipkart in 2018. According to documents filed by Flipkart with regulators, he has now transferred 539,912 equity shares to FIT Holdings SARL, a Luxembourg entity owned and operated by Walmart, for $76.4 million. The latest deal has reduced his stake to 3.52%.

“With this transfer, Binny Bansal has monetised a small portion of his shareholding,” Vivek Durai, the founder of business intelligence platform Paper.vc told ET. “He had sold 1,122,433 shares for about $159 million during the Walmart takeover.”

An email sent to Bansal late on Sunday did not elicit any response at the time of going to press.

Bansal is now a prolific investor in the country’s startup ecosystem, one that he, along with his Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, has played a major role in building. In December, he wrote a $25 million cheque, his largest so far, to online insurance startup Acko, leading its $65 million equity financing round, as first reported by ET. He has also backed artificial intelligence venture Spotdraft, healthtech company NIRAMAI and Crio, a learning platform for developers, among others.

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, acquired Flipkart for about $16 billion last year, in what was the largest ecommerce M&A transaction globally. At the time, Walmart had acquired 77% of the Bengaluru-headquartered company, valuing it at $21 billion. Sachin Bansal had sold his entire stake, earning an estimated $800 million to $1billion.

 
According to his contract with Walmart, Binny Bansal is entitled to sell more than half his stake by August 2020, two years after the closure of the transaction, people close to the matter had told ET at the time. He could raise around $400 million from this, provided the company meets certain milestones.

In November last year, Binny Bansal, stepped down from his group CEO and chairman roles at Flipkart, following an internal probe conducted to investigate an allegation of personal misconduct against him. He was, however, exonerated of the charges. Bansal, who is believed to be largely based in Singapore now, continues to hold a board seat in Flipkart and is a cofounder of xto10x Technologies, launched last year along with former Flipkart and McKinsey executive Saikiran Krishnamurthy.