Ashish Gupta. Photo credit: Facebook
The euphoria around $16 billion Flipkart-Walmart deal, touted as the world's biggest e-Com takeover ever, is refusing to die down. From Flipkart poster boys Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal making a big kill and their biggest investors taking home manifold returns on investment to over 100 Flipkart employees entering the millionaire's club, the success stories are aplenty. Among these, is the story of angel investor Ashish Gupta who nine years ago in 2009 invested just Rs 10 lakh in Flipkart. His considerably smaller bet would now yield him over 120 crore ($18-20 million).
Ashish Gupta, an IIT-Kanpur alumnus who also won President's Gold medal at the prestigious institute, is known as a smart and witty angel investor in the venture capitalists circles. He, however, doesn't believe in making many angel investments but when he does, they turn into 'gold'.
According to a report published in Mint, Gupta who co-founded price comparison website Junglee way back in the 90s, sold the start-up to Amazon for $240 million in 1998. After about 20 years, he'll make around $18-20 million (over 120 crore) on his meagre investment of Rs 10 lakh from Amazon's rival combine in India, Flipkart-Walmart. He invested in Flipkart during the start-up's first-ever round of funding from American venture capital firm Accel Partners.
He co-founded two more companies, Tavant Technologies and Helion, and serves on several boards, including Ezetap, Pubmatic, Simplilearn, SMSGupshup, Naukri and Qwikcilver.
Gupta has earned the name of one of the most successful angel investors in India with some of his other investments, including Minjar, Daksh (IBM), Naukri, MakeMyTrip, MuSigma, Upwork, and Redbus, still shining brightly in the Indian e-commerce space.
"Ashish has had a great track record as an angel investor and has made several smart bets that have paid off in a big way over the years. He's had a knack of spotting and betting on smart ideas and founders," Mint quoted Abhishek Goyal, founder of Tracxn, as saying.
A Kauffman Fellow and PhD from Computer Science from Stanford University, Gupta's even bigger return was on his investment in MuSigma, a Bengaluru-based data analytics and decision sciences firm, in which he took away around $50 million (Rs 336 crore) on slightly more investment than Flipkart.