Flipkart Raises $20mn From Tiger Global [Guess The Valuation]

Flipkart has raised $20mn from Tiger Global LLC in its Series C round and this takes the total amount raised to $31 million.

The funding will be used for marketing initiatives and the company earlier raised $10mn from Tiger Global (and Accel Capital). Essentially, Flipkart needs to go beyond the tier-1 cities and penetrate deeply into tier-2 and tier-3 cities (which is where they need to get the next generation of buyer/sellers hooked onto the service).

We earlier shared the traffic of ecommerce sites in India and eBay clearly leads the race, followed by Homeshop18.

Traffic of Ecommerce Websites In India

Having said that, Flipkart is making way for a niche startup to come and dethrone it’s (earlier) positioning from being a ‘great site for book lovers’ (circle of life, anyone?).

Is Flipkart an IPO story in making? Or a sweet deal for Amazon to enter India (they have been testing Indian waters) and acquire Flipkart (whose IP lies in backend support system)?
Given that Flipkart isn’t yet profitable (far from being one), the only game is to either hit the public market (so that VCs can exit) or get acquired by a giant like Amazon (so that VCs can exit).
At total fund of $31mn, how much do you think is the Flipkart valuation? Do share ‘your guess’ in the comment section.

At the first UnPluggd event, Sachin Bansal (Flipkart cofounder) shared the Flipkart story on how they didn’t plan to really build a business of this scale (and instead, an affiliate business of sorts).

Do watch the video



Recommended Discussion: Stale Internet Growth in India -Is Offline Promotion the Way to Market Internet Business?

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InMobi Launches SmartPay, Global Mobile Payment Service

InMobi has launched SmartPay, a global mobile payment service that will enable app developers, game companies, and content providers in the mobile content and virtual goods space to expand their business and monetize their users quickly by providing a one-time, no setup cost, single point of integration across multiple countries.
The solution offers consumers a seamless, pure mobile checkout experience using secure, direct to carrier billing to start, but expanding to all forms of mobile payment methods including credit cards, PayPal, and local mobile wallets by the end of the year.

“Today’s mobile payment options are basic transaction pipelines and offer very little beyond providing transactional support. InMobi SmartPay™ is a ‘performance based’ payments platform that provides data and insights through an easy to use interface, which help merchants optimize conversion paths, product offering, and pricing to maximize their ROI. Developers can also track advertising performance from impression all the way through to conversion. The result is better ad targeting, higher conversion rates & better revenues.”

“InMobi SmartPay™ technology automatically recognizes the country, handset, operator and OS of the consumer and dynamically serves the buying path most likely to convert. With 4.2 million possible combinations, automating this task is a huge benefit to developers.”[blog]

InMobi’s SmartPay currently supports 7 countries (US, UK, Germany, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and South Africa) and plans to expand to 30 countries by end of this year.
Given that InMobi has witnessed phenomenal success in non-US markets, this seems to be the logical move by being more developer friendly and hence, be the pipe that enables transactions across platforms.

The road however isn’t going to be smooth for the team, as there are multiple options (for payment plus there is quite a mafia everywhere) and integrating payment systems across different countries will entail its own friction.
Of course, if this succeeds, InMobi will be a super awesome acquisition target.
What’s your take?

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