Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal started their ecommerce company Flipkart in a Bangalore bedroom in 2007. Friends since their student days at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, the two — unrelated despite sharing a surname — were bored with their jobs providing back-end IT services for Amazon in its home market. Restless, they decided to start their own business catering to India’s domestic consumers.
Since then, Flipkart has grown from a tiny online bookstore into India’s biggest online shopping platform. Still based in the tech hub of Bangalore, and considered by customers as the “Amazon of India”, it ships about 8m packages a month, containing anything from apparel to electronics and home appliances, to cities and towns across India.
Now it is going head-to-head against the company its founders once emulated — and a clutch of other rivals — as all vie for supremacy in India, the world’s biggest untapped ecommerce market.