Two former Amazon staff built Flipkart into India's biggest online store
In October 2007 Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, IIT Delhi graduates who had worked at Amazon, started selling books online from a two-bedroom flat in Bengaluru's Koramangala. Each family put in ₹200,000. Eleven years later Walmart outbid Amazon to buy control of the company for US$16 billion.
By 2008 the site was handling about 100 orders a day. It soon branched into electronics, fashion and groceries, and bought its way into new segments: the online fashion shop Myntra, the rival Jabong, the payments start-up PhonePe and a stake in the mapping firm MapmyIndia. Not every bet worked. A DRM-free music store called Flyte lasted barely a year before free streaming sites killed it in 2013.
Its signature event became the Big Billion Day sale, first held on 6 October 2014 to coincide with its anniversary and Diwali. It sold US$100 million of goods in 10 hours but drew complaints about crashes and stock shortages. By 2017 the sale moved 1.3 million phones in 20 hours, and Flipkart shipped 51% of India's smartphones that year against Amazon India's 33%.
Walmart completed the purchase of a 77% stake in August 2018, while Indian traders protested that it threatened local shops. Sachin Bansal left at once. Binny Bansal resigned as chief executive that November after a misconduct inquiry that found no evidence for the complaint but criticised his lack of transparency, and he sold his remaining shares in 2024. Walmart's holding rose to 81.3%.
Flipkart has since spun off PhonePe, launched 90-minute and quick-commerce delivery, and in 2025 announced plans to move its legal home from Singapore to India. A 2023 industry report put its share of Indian e-commerce at 48%.
Source: Flipkart
