By the second half of 2007, two young software engineers were running a bookshop out of a Bengaluru house, and they were doing every job themselves. They wrote the code, collected books from local shops, answered customer queries and delivered the parcels. Sachin Bansal later called it "a two-man show". They had pooled somewhere between $6,000 and ₹5.7 lakh, depending on whose account you read, and the company was not formally registered until 14 October 2008, about a year after they started coding.
Both men came from Chandigarh and both went to IIT Delhi. Sachin took the entrance exam twice, climbing from an all-India rank of 2470 to 49. Binny, he has said, was turned down twice by Google before he ended up at Amazon. It was at Amazon's Bengaluru office that the two, who are not related, first became close friends. Binny had joined Amazon in January 2007 and stayed about nine months; Sachin had spent a year or so on the Amazon Web Services side after an earlier job at Techspan. Then, tired of their jobs, they resigned.
Binny, he has said, was turned down twice by Google before he ended up at Amazon.
Nobody rushed to help. They struggled to get friends to join them, and early investors told them they were wasting their time. Book distributors were baffled: of the fifty-odd in Bengaluru, the pair managed to meet only about half, and the question they kept hearing was why anyone would leave a great job at Amazon. For the first four or five months, customers hardly came. They tried blog partnerships and handed out bookmarks at book fairs. It took about eighteen months before a small firm, Accel, pledged about $1 million in 2009 (Accel's own pages later describe its first cheque as $800,000). Even then, the partners who backed them, Subrata Mitra and Prashanth Prakash, did so despite worries that two men in their mid-twenties had no supply-chain experience.
The turn came sideways. When Flipkart added electronics, buyers refused to pay before they held the product, unlike book readers who did not mind paying a few hundred rupees upfront. So the founders offered cash on delivery, which Binny later called "a big innovation". Customers multiplied, a New York hedge fund put in $10 million, and the company reportedly began doubling every few months.
Success did not come clean. In 2012 Flipkart launched several categories at once, missed its targets, and Binny admitted the team "didn't know why"; raising money got harder. The 2014 Big Billion Day sale crashed under demand, and in mid-2015 a new seller-focused strategy failed just as Amazon poured in money. In 2018 Walmart bought about 77% for roughly $16 billion. Sachin sold his stake, and his net worth stood at a little over $1 billion. Binny resigned in November 2018 after a misconduct allegation; a Walmart investigation found no evidence for the assault claims but flagged poor judgement, as the Wall Street Journal reported.
Today Walmart owns about 85%. In the year to March 2025 Flipkart booked revenue of ₹82,787 crore and a net loss of ₹5,189 crore, and in 2025 it moved to bring its parent company home to India.
Binny once said that the feeling of having arrived lasted only five minutes. For a first-time founder, that may be the more useful lesson than any valuation: the early years were won by two people doing unglamorous work by hand, while the people around them kept asking why they had quit a good job.