Flipkart Funding Update : $200 Million More From Existing Investors!

Sachin Bansal, the founder and CEO of Flipkart has said that there was a lot of skepticism about Flipkart and the overall e-Commerce in India. The latest round of funding by Flipkart refuses that. The founder team sees the latest funding as a 'great validation'.
Flipkart has raised a total of $380 million from investors, which amounts to Rs. 2280 crores. The company says that the latest funds will be invested in improving the supply chain, automation and making new hires.
Flipkart's Funding History
Flipkart's first ever funds came from the pockets of its founders: Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal who invested a sum of Rs. 4,00,000 from their own savings. That was year 2007. Since then, the company raised about $1 million from Accel India (in 2009), about 10 million in 2010 from Tiger Global and again about $20 million in June 2012.
The fourth round of funding happened on August 24, 2012 in which the company raised about $150 million from MIH and ICONIQ Capital.
The company invested the capital in making a few key purchases. In 2010, the company acquired 'WeRead' which was a popular social book discovery tool, followed by the acquisition of Mime360 in 2011 - which allowed the company to offer the Flyte Digital Store. Unfortunately, the company shut down the Flyte Digital Store last month stating that the Indian eCommerce markets aren't yet ready for the digital music purchases. The company had also acquired Chakpak which offered a wide range of updates/news/photos and videos from Bollywood.
A key acquisition in 2012 was the take over of direct competitor - LetsBuy.com which was struggling with supply-chain and customer support services. The company closed down the brand and diverted all of LetsBuy's traffic to its own flagship portal.
The Competition Is Fierce!
The Indian eCommerce industry is going through very interesting times. With the arrival of Amazon, people are expecting a head to head competition with Flipkart. Amazon, so far, has been very selective in launching the product categories and has already tasted the Indian markets with Junglee.com - which they announced several months ago. Flipkart, which sells a whooping 20 products a minute is already projecting sales of about 10 billion rupees in 2014. It however looks like the company is still struggling with profit margins.
There were rumours that if Flipkart does not raise funds before November this year, the company would go out of business. If those were true, the latest found of fundraising would definitely add more oxygen to Flipkart's cylinders.
We recently reported that Flipkart's making foray into online payment gateways to make sure that they can use their current infrastructure to grow the revenues with <a href="https://www.crazyengineers.com/threads/flipkart-payzippy-online-payment-gateway-for-indian-merchants.68857">Flipkart PayZippy - Online Payment Gateway For Indian Merchants</a>. The service will allow Flipkart a chance to be the de-facto payment systems to be used for every transaction that happens online.
We think Flipkart's either getting ready to play it big (read: float an IPO in the next 2-3 years) or just ensuring that they're a great acquisition target for a bigger eCommerce player (read Amazon). Do let us know what you think!