The fresh cash is being deployed at a time when Walmart-owned Flipkart is scaling many of its new businesses like epharmacy, travel, social commerce platform Shopsy and doubling down on its grocery business.
The Bengaluru-based company has also allotted new Esops (Employee stock owner programme), in Flipkart Private Limited, the filings showed.
The investments in Flipkart Marketplace and Flipkart Health is routed through Flipkart Private ltd. Flipkart is domiciled in Singapore and has various units registered in India through which it runs its business here.
A spokesperson for Flipkart declined to comment on Thursday to ETtech’s query.
Besides the marketplace investment, Flipkart’s new money for the health unit is significant as it recently appointed Prashant Jhaveri as its CEO.
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In an interview with ET in January,
Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy had said healthcare will be one of the businesses it is looking to scale this year.
Flipkart has also made strategic investments for its epharmacy and travel units.
This comes at a time when upstarts such as Meesho, are trying to fight bigger rivals like Flipkart and Amazon India and Singapore’s Shopee which made an abrupt exit from the local market earlier this week,
reported first by ETtech.
Last year
Flipkart raised $3.6 billion in what was its first external funding since Walmart acquired it in 2018. The company was valued at $37.6 billion post this round compared to $24.9 billion in 2020 when
it raised $1.2 billion in an internal round led by Walmart.
Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), the Singapore government’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Flipkart’s largest shareholder Walmart led the round, with participation from existing backers like Qatar Investment Authority.
“ Shopsy, grocery, travel and healthcare, these are big and we made massive investments… We want to really get these to the next level of growth and pull in customer adoption over the next 12-18 months…” Krishnamurthy told ET in January.
ET reported on February 18 that
Flipkart had started delivering groceries in 45 minutes in parts of Bengaluru, halving its quick delivery service time from 90 minutes under Flipkart Quick. It plans to scale up the 45-minute delivery to other cities but is unlikely to enter the 15-20 minutes ultrafast grocery delivery business. Krishnamurthy had added in his interview with ET that he doesn’t think the 15-minute delivery is the right model for consumers on a long-term basis.
