I Was Extremely Unhappy: Sachin Bansal on Selling Flipkart

Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal was unhappy selling the ecommerce platform to Walmart in 2018. Bansal said the exit was not something that he had planned and that remained his unfinished business.

“I was extremely unhappy after the exit because it was not something that I had planned. I think it just happened. So that's the unfinished business where the goal was to take the platform that I had created or helped create to build people. That was kind of unfinished business that I still pursue,” he said at a panel discussion during the Startup Mahakumbh in New Delhi on Friday.

Walmart in 2018 had bought online shopping website Flipkart for $16 billion, a record purchase amount for any ecommerce firm.

Flipkart was founded in 2007 by Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal. The firm was backed by global investors such as Tencent, Tiger Global and Microsoft. Walmart by December 2023 had raised its stake to about 81% in Flipkart.

Speaking on the impact of technology on businesses, he said the next five years will be completely different in comparision to the last 20 years.

He said that artificial intelligence will be the next big thing for all the businesses.

Bansal said that most of Navi’s customer support has been automated through AI, which is a huge difference from the past. “That's a kind of tsunami,” he said, adding that close to 25-30% of the code is already automated.