Kunal Bahl did not come home to build a startup. He came home because the United States said he could not stay.
Profile summaries say he was deported over a visa problem around 2007 or 2008. He had studied at Wharton, after DPS R K Puram in Delhi, and had a job at Microsoft. The dates in these accounts do not match each other, and this piece does not try to settle them. What they agree on is the sequence. A career abroad ended on someone else's rule. A man who was born in New Delhi found himself back in New Delhi with a plan to make and no company.
He had studied at Wharton, after DPS R K Puram in Delhi, and had a job at Microsoft.
He called Rohit Bansal, a school friend.
That is the part the later billion-dollar story leaves out. Snapdeal's founding is told as a vision. It started more like a phone call.
The pair launched Snapdeal on 4 February 2010 as a daily deals site, copying a format that was hot in the US. It did not last long. Within months Bahl and Bansal told their investors they would shut the deals business and become a marketplace. By October 2011 they had.
The pivot worked. Nexus and Bessemer backed it, then eBay, then SoftBank, which put in $647 million in 2014 and became the biggest shareholder. A $500 million round followed in 2015. In 2016 the company was valued at $6.5 billion.
Then the price arrived. SoftBank pushed for a merger with Flipkart, and talks collapsed in July 2017 over valuation and special payouts to early investors. Bahl chose to stay and shrink. Snapdeal sold Freecharge and Vulcan Express and focused on small-town buyers. Revenue grew 74 percent from 2017 to 2021 while losses dropped nearly 95 percent, but FY23 revenue was only Rs 388 crore, against an operating loss of Rs 282 crore, and a planned $152 million IPO was shelved in December 2022.
Bahl now runs AceVector, the group that holds Snapdeal and other businesses, and invests through Titan Capital.
The quiet lesson is in the order of events. The company that nearly reached $6.5 billion was born from a forced exit, a call to a school friend and a pivot made within months. A bad turn does not end the plan. It can be the reason the plan exists.