Tale of Revival

After being on the verge of shutting down in 2017 following a failed merger with Flipkart, Gurugram-headquartered Snapdeal has seen revenue surge and unique customers grow with its focus on value ecommerce

- MANU BALACHANDRAN

Kunal Bahl doesn’t like to give up easily. And certainly not without a fight.

A pioneer in the Indian e-commerce industry, Bahl co-founded Snapdeal—one of the country’s earliest unicorns—in 2010, when he was just 24. Within six years, it became the second-biggest e-commerce company in the country, with a market valuation of $6.5 billion. In that period, apart from becoming a darling among investors—Snapdeal boasted some heavyweights as investors, including Ratan Tata, eBay, SoftBank, and Nexus Venture—it also acquired 11 companies, the most notable being FreeCharge and Unicommerce.

Then, in the summer of 2017, the dream run came to a screeching halt. Seven years after it was founded, an imminent shutdown loomed over the Gurugram-headquartered company after a failed merger with Flipkart. It was left with inadequate funds, enough to barely last a month. Bahl and co-founder Rohit Bansal were in a similar situation sometime in 2013 when the funds had run dry, but 2017 was different. Raising money wasn’t going to be easy and it would only mean the end of the road, as Amazon and Flipkart tightened their grip over the Indian market. Even the planned sale to Flipkart was at a fraction of its peak valuation of $6.5 billion.

Bahl and Bansal, however, weren’t ready to leave without a fight. “With a perplexed team in the office and critics crowing from rooftops, it was much easier for Rohit and I to move away, washing our hands off a toxic situation,” Bahl wrote on LinkedIn in 2018. “That, however, was farthest from our minds.”