Snapdeal might not have ended up being the success that it had been initially envisaged to be, but its founders continue to make their mark in a different field — angel investing.
Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal have exited their investment from Urban Company. The duo had invested Rs. 57 lakh in Urban Company in 2015, but have exited with Rs. 111 crore. This is more than a 200x return on their original investment.
The exit was a part of a $50 million secondary transaction at Urban Company. Apart from Bahl and Bansal, some Urban Company employees also offloaded their stock options as part of the secondary deal. Vamsi Duvvuri, founder and managing partner of Dharana Capital, will join the Urban Company board as a non-executive director.
“Urban Company has built an enduring and growing business with a strong foundation. We have been fortunate to be part of this journey from its earliest days and immense credit is due to Abhiraj (Singh Bhal), Varun (Khaitan) and Raghav (Chandra) and their team for building it with great determination, resilience and foresight,” Titan Capital said in a statement.
This isn’t the only time that the Snapdeal founders have made a killing on their angel investments. While they were still running Snapdeal, and competing fiercely with Flipkart and Amazon, they had backed dozens of startups, and these investments have been fetching them handsome returns. Late last year, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal had made Rs. 76 crore each on their investment in Mamaearth when the company had gone public, which was a more than 100x return on their initial investment. The duo have also realized more than 100x returns on their investments in Ola, OfBusiness and Credgenics.
Since 2015, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal have made their startup investments through a new company named Titan Capital. Titan Capital has invested in over 300 startups, and has recently also raised money from limited partners or sponsors to double down on its big bets. Bahl and Bansal regularly feature in the lists of the most prolific angel investors in India, and have likely made several times more from their investing than from running Snapdeal.
And this might’ve been a strategy that’s paid off for the duo. Instead of betting their futures on a single startup — Snapdeal — they instead looked to invest in as many startups as they could, and took what amounted to a bet on India’s overall startup space. And while Snapdeal has floundered and largely fallen by the wayside, their investments have yielded them some eye-popping returns — and made their involvement in the Indian startup space very much worth its while.