Sachin Bansal had the rank to get into IIT. He took the exam again anyway.
His first JEE attempt had put him at All India Rank 2470 — high enough for a seat in most engineering colleges in the country. He sat the paper a second time and came out at 49. Then he chose IIT Delhi and computer science. That is the line almost no profile of the Flipkart co-founder leads with, and it is the one that explains the rest.
That is the line almost no profile of the Flipkart co-founder leads with, and it is the one that explains the rest.
He grew up in Chandigarh, where his father ran a business and his mother stayed home, and attended St. Anne's Convent School. After IIT he worked at Techspan for a few months and then at Amazon Web Services, until 2007. That October he and Binny Bansal, no relation, started Flipkart as an online bookstore with about Rs 4,00,000.
Flipkart became the biggest story in Indian e-commerce. In 2018, when Walmart bought control, Bansal sold his 5.5% stake, and was reported to be worth a little over a billion dollars. A non-compete barred him from competing businesses for 18 months and from competing investments for 36.
What almost nobody noticed at the time was how fast he moved. He set up BAC Acquisitions that December. In 2019 he put $100 million into Ola. He bought Maven Hive, and then the COCO insurance brand in 2020, and Navi Technologies was announced in April 2020. A draft IPO for Rs 3,350 crore followed in March 2022, though the listing never happened.
The price of speed came later. In October 2024 the RBI restricted lending at Navi Finserv. The ban was lifted, and Navi Finserv still posted revenue of Rs 2,271 crore in FY25, up 19%, but profit fell 67% to Rs 222 crore, and the group swung to a loss of about Rs 126 crore. Bansal stepped down as CEO and became executive chairman. In July 2026 the company was reportedly working toward a fresh IPO in 12 to 18 months.
The thing worth carrying away is the second JEE paper. Bansal did not stop at a good result. He re-took the test for a better one. Years later, he left a company worth billions to start over. People who are comfortable with a second attempt tend to be good at the third.