Flipkart is preparing an initial public offering that could value it at up to $70 billion, and its main marketplace company has never turned an annual profit. In the year to March 2025, nearly a third of that company’s revenue — ₹6,317 crore — came not from taking a cut of what shoppers bought, but from selling advertising to the brands desperate to be seen, as per its filings reported by Entrackr. India’s original e-commerce champion makes a surprising share of its money the way a media company does.
That is the tension inside Flipkart as it heads towards the public markets. Founded in a Bengaluru apartment in 2007, marked down to a fraction of its value in 2016, rescued by Walmart in 2018 and now the largest online retailer in the country by most estimates, its marketplace arm reported revenue of ₹20,493 crore in FY25 (about $2.1 billion; $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026) — and a net loss of ₹1,494 crore, as per Entrackr and MediaNama. This is how a bookshop became a marketplace that earns like an advertising platform.
Quick facts
| Company | Flipkart — Flipkart Internet Pvt Ltd (marketplace) and Flipkart India Pvt Ltd (wholesale) |
| Founded | October 2007, Bengaluru |
| Founders | Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (both ex-Amazon, IIT Delhi; not related) |
| Controlled by | Walmart, which bought about 77% in May 2018 |
| FY25 marketplace revenue | ₹20,493 crore, with a net loss of ₹1,494 crore |
| FY25 advertising revenue | ₹6,317 crore (about 31% of marketplace revenue) |
| Last private valuation | $37.6 billion (July 2021 funding round) |
| IPO status | Planning a 2026 filing; reported target of $60–70 billion |
| CEO | Kalyan Krishnamurthy |
What Flipkart actually does
Flipkart runs India’s largest home-grown online marketplace. It does not, for the most part, own the goods on its app; it connects sellers and brands with shoppers and takes a cut for the introduction, the advertising slot and the delivery. Around that core sit several businesses: Ekart, its in-house logistics and delivery network; a large advertising operation that sells visibility to brands; Flipkart Minutes, a quick-commerce service launched in 2024; and Myntra, the fashion platform it acquired in 2014. The fashion, payments and travel arms extend the same idea into new categories.
Its customers, then, are two-sided. Shoppers get selection, credit and doorstep delivery, often on cash terms. Sellers and brands get access to hundreds of millions of buyers, plus the tools — listings, ads, warehousing and shipping — to reach them. Flipkart sells the sellers access to India’s shoppers, and increasingly it sells them attention. That distinction is the whole story of where its money now comes from.
The insight: trust, not price
When Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal left Amazon’s Bengaluru operation and started Flipkart in October 2007, the two IIT Delhi engineers — who share a surname but are not related — began with an initial capital of about ₹4,00,000 and an online bookshop run from a Koramangala flat, as per Wikipedia and contemporaneous accounts. They wrote the code, picked up books from local shops, packed the parcels and delivered many of them themselves.
The insight was that in India of the late 2000s the barrier to buying online was not price but trust. Shoppers did not believe a website would take their money and actually deliver the right product. Flipkart’s answer was to remove the leap of faith: cash on delivery, so you paid only when the parcel arrived; and its own delivery arm, so it controlled the last, trust-defining mile. Books were simply the safe, standard, easy-to-ship product to prove the model. Once shoppers trusted the parcel, Flipkart could sell them phones, fashion and everything after.
The struggle years
The climb was not smooth. On 6 October 2014 Flipkart ran its first Big Billion Day sale, and the demand broke it: the payment and warehousing systems buckled, fewer than 10% of visitors could complete a purchase, and the founders issued a public apology, saying they had not lived up to their promises. It was a very visible failure at the moment the company most wanted to look invincible.
Worse followed on the balance sheet. Having peaked at a $15.2 billion valuation in mid-2015, Flipkart was marked down repeatedly through 2016 by its own investors: Morgan Stanley cut its estimate several times that year, and by late November 2016 valued the stake at about $5.6 billion, with T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and others following, as per CNBC and Business Standard. The company was burning cash in a price war with Amazon, and the market for private capital had turned. In January 2017 Kalyan Krishnamurthy took over as Flipkart’s chief executive as Binny Bansal moved up to group CEO. And in November 2018, months after the Walmart deal, Binny Bansal resigned following an independent probe into an allegation of serious personal misconduct; the investigation did not corroborate the specific allegation but found lapses in judgement, as per CNBC and Walmart’s own statement. Sachin Bansal had already left with the Walmart sale.
The turning point: the Walmart cheque
The single event that reset Flipkart’s trajectory was Walmart’s arrival. On 9 May 2018 Walmart announced it would acquire about 77% of Flipkart for roughly $16 billion, valuing the company at about $20.8 billion, as per Walmart’s filing and Bloomberg (some reports put the figure near $22 billion). Of that, around $14 billion bought out existing shareholders and about $2 billion was fresh equity into the business. SoftBank, Sachin Bansal and others sold; Binny Bansal, Tencent, Tiger Global and Microsoft stayed on.
Look at the numbers on either side of that decision. Eighteen months earlier, in November 2016, Morgan Stanley had marked Flipkart at about $5.6 billion and the mood was that the India e-commerce story might not pay off. After May 2018 the company was valued near $20.8 billion and backed by the largest retailer on earth. The deal did something more important than lift the valuation: it replaced the funding cycle with a balance sheet. Flipkart could keep losing money to hold its ground against Amazon without having to persuade a new investor every year. The cost of that safety was ownership — the founders’ company became a Walmart subsidiary.
The money behind it
Flipkart’s cap table reads like a history of Indian venture capital. Accel was the early institutional backer; Tiger Global became the defining pre-Walmart investor, funding round after round as Flipkart raced Amazon. In August 2017 SoftBank’s Vision Fund put in about $2.5 billion, its largest single cheque to that point — and then sold the stake to Walmart barely nine months later at a profit. The Walmart transaction of May 2018, about $16 billion for roughly 77%, is the cheque that changed everything, turning a cash-strapped challenger into the best-funded retailer in the market.
After Walmart took control, Flipkart raised external capital only once more of note: in July 2021 it took in $3.6 billion at a post-money valuation of $37.6 billion, from a group led by GIC, Canada’s CPP Investments, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and Walmart, with Tencent, Tiger Global and several sovereign funds alongside, as per TechCrunch and YourStory. That round, widely read as a pre-IPO raise, is the last reported private valuation. What each backer changed is clear enough: Accel gave the idea its first credibility, Tiger Global gave it the firepower to fight, SoftBank gave it scale, and Walmart gave it permanence.
How Flipkart makes money
The marketplace entity, Flipkart Internet Pvt Ltd, makes money from sellers, not shoppers. When you buy a phone on Flipkart, you are usually buying it from a third-party seller, not from Flipkart; the company earns a marketplace commission on the sale, a logistics and fulfilment fee for storing and shipping it through Ekart, and — increasingly — an advertising fee the seller paid to appear near the top of your search. In FY25, marketplace-services income more than doubled to ₹7,751 crore, about 38% of operating revenue, while advertising brought in ₹6,317 crore, about 31%, as per Entrackr. Logistics and other services made up most of the rest.
The costs are the mirror image: paying delivery partners, running warehouses, and — the big one — funding the discounts and marketing that keep shoppers coming. Marketing costs alone rose 37% to ₹4,100 crore in FY25, roughly 18% of total expenses. The part people get wrong is where the margin sits. Commission on goods is competitive and thin; the profitable layer is advertising, which is why the company has leaned into it so hard. A marketplace at scale slowly turns into a place that sells sellers the visibility to be found — a far better business than shipping boxes.
The numbers
Here is the marketplace entity, Flipkart Internet Pvt Ltd, over four years to 31 March, from filings reported by Business Standard, Inc42 and Entrackr. The unit is ₹ crore.
| Year | Revenue from operations | Net loss |
| FY22 | ₹10,477 crore | (₹4,420 crore) |
| FY23 | ₹14,846 crore | (₹4,027 crore) |
| FY24 | ₹17,907 crore | (₹2,359 crore) |
| FY25 | ₹20,493 crore | (₹1,494 crore) |
The direction is unmistakable: revenue up 96% across the three years, and the net loss down about two-thirds, from ₹4,420 crore in FY22 to ₹1,494 crore in FY25, as the higher-margin advertising and marketplace income grew faster than costs. The EBITDA loss narrowed to ₹1,078 crore in FY25 from ₹1,869 crore the year before, as per Entrackr. But note the word throughout: loss. Even in its best year, the marketplace did not make an annual profit — it lost less. And this is only the better half of the group.
Where the money actually comes from
Most people picture Flipkart’s income as a slice of every basket — a commission on the phone, the shoes, the television. The FY25 split says otherwise. Of the marketplace’s ₹20,493 crore, marketplace commissions were about 38%, advertising about 31%, and logistics and other services the remaining third, as per Entrackr. Nearly a third of the money is not a cut of what you spend at all; it is brands paying to be seen. That is the promise from the opening of this piece, and the filings pay it off: Flipkart’s marketplace increasingly earns like a media business bolted onto a logistics network.
The bigger surprise is the second company most shoppers never hear about. Flipkart India Pvt Ltd, the wholesale or business-to-business arm that buys goods and sells them on to sellers, is far larger by turnover and far deeper in the red: it reported a loss of ₹5,189 crore in FY25, more than three times the marketplace’s loss, on revenue up 17%, as per Angel One, YourStory and MediaNama. When the group lists, public investors will be pricing both halves — the marketplace that is closing on break-even, and the wholesale arm that is not.
The risks
The first risk is the one the IPO itself creates. A listing prices the whole group, and the group loses money: the marketplace lost ₹1,494 crore and the wholesale arm ₹5,189 crore in FY25. Flipkart is reportedly targeting a valuation of $60–70 billion, as per Business Standard — well above the $37.6 billion of its 2021 round — for a business that has never posted an annual profit. If public shareholders demand profitability sooner than expected, the discounting and the ₹4,100 crore marketing budget that drive its gross merchandise value become hard to sustain, and growth slows exactly when the market is watching.
The second risk is legal and structural. The Competition Commission of India investigated Flipkart and Amazon from 2020 and concluded that they favoured a small set of preferred sellers in search rankings and listings; sellers have challenged the process in the Karnataka High Court, and the Supreme Court has directed related petitions to be heard together there, as per MediaNama and Deccan Herald. An adverse outcome could force changes to how the marketplace ranks and lists sellers — the very machinery that makes the commission and advertising money. The third risk is that Flipkart is now funding a second cash-hungry business, Flipkart Minutes, in the ten-minute delivery war against Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart and Zepto, adding dark-store costs at the same moment it wants to show IPO-ready economics — all while Amazon and Reliance press from either side.
The takeaway
The transferable lesson is that a marketplace, once it is big enough, stops making its best money from the transaction and starts making it from the seller’s need to be found. Flipkart’s most profitable product is not the phone in your cart; it is the advertising slot the seller of that phone bought to get into your search results. When you look at any platform business, ask what the customer thinks they are paying for versus what actually earns the margin — because the gap between those two is usually where the real business, and the real risk, sits. Flipkart is heading to the market as a retailer. It will trade as something closer to an advertising and logistics company that happens to run a shop.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns Flipkart?
Walmart has controlled Flipkart since May 2018, when it bought about 77% of the company for roughly $16 billion. Other shareholders have included Tencent, Tiger Global and, since the 2021 round, GIC, CPP Investments and SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2.
Is Flipkart profitable?
No. Its marketplace entity, Flipkart Internet Pvt Ltd, narrowed its net loss to ₹1,494 crore in FY25 but has never made an annual profit. The group’s wholesale arm, Flipkart India Pvt Ltd, lost ₹5,189 crore in FY25.
How does Flipkart make money?
Mainly from sellers, not shoppers: marketplace commissions, logistics and fulfilment fees through Ekart, and advertising. In FY25, advertising alone brought in ₹6,317 crore, about 31% of marketplace revenue.
When is the Flipkart IPO?
Flipkart is reported to be preparing to file for an IPO in 2026, with a listing expected in late 2026 or early 2027, at a target valuation of $60–70 billion. It completed a shift of domicile from Singapore to India in March 2026 to enable a domestic listing.
Who founded Flipkart?
Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, two former Amazon employees and IIT Delhi engineers who are not related, founded it in Bengaluru in October 2007 as an online bookshop.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr — Flipkart Internet FY25 revenue, advertising and losses, September 2025
- MediaNama — Flipkart FY25 results and IPO context, October 2025
- Business Standard — Flipkart Internet FY22 and FY23 results; Morgan Stanley markdowns, 2016; IPO valuation target, April 2025
- Inc42 — Flipkart Internet FY23 revenue breakdown, December 2023
- Angel One / YourStory — Flipkart India (wholesale) FY25 loss of ₹5,189 crore, September 2025
- Walmart Inc. / Bloomberg — acquisition of about 77% of Flipkart for $16 billion, May 2018
- CNBC — Binny Bansal resignation after misconduct probe, November 2018; Morgan Stanley markdown, 2016
- TechCrunch / YourStory — $3.6 billion round at $37.6 billion valuation, July 2021
- MediaNama / Deccan Herald — CCI investigation and Karnataka High Court challenge, 2024–2025
- Business Standard / Businessworld — domicile shift to India and 2026 IPO plans, 2025–2026
- Wikipedia — founding history, founders’ background and early operations
- Trading Economics — USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026
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