In the largest-ever investment in an online Indian company, e-commerce giant Flipkart got an investment of $2.5 billion from a Japanese telecom and internet company. Japanese group SoftBank’s new $93bn Vision Fund has invested $2.5bn in Indian Flipkart – the biggest private investment in the company’s technology sector.
The fresh capital extends the size of Flipkart’s financing round, which was announced this April, to $4 billion, boosting its firepower in its battle with Amazon in the online retail market. Flipkart will now be valued at $14.2 billion, sources said. The fund raise eclipses the highs set by Flipkart and Paytm when they both raised $1.4 billion earlier this year. The Flipkart investment comes after SoftBank’s failed attempt to merge its portfolio company and Snapdeal with Flipkart.
“India is a land of vast opportunity,” SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son said in a statement, calling Flipkart “the pioneers in Indian e-commerce”. Notably, SoftBank had tried for several months to engineer a merger of Snapdeal with Flipkart, but it emerged last week that those talks had broken down.
