Binny Bansal & Sachal Bansal

Binny Bansal and Sachal Bansal are two Indian entrepreneurs, chiefly famous for founding the e-commerce platform Flipkart.

India Today Magazine jointly ranked Binny and Sachal Bansal #26 on their “India’s 50 Most Powerful People of 2017” list.

Binny Bansal

Early life

Binny Bansal is originally from Chandigarh, a city that serves as state capital for both Punjab and Haryana. The city is not a part of either of these two neighboring states – it is instead governed directly by the Government of India.

Bansal’s father was a chief manager at a bank and his mother worked in the government sector.

Binny Bansal’s business partner Sachal Bansal is also from Chandigarh, but they are not from the same family despite sharing the same last name. In a further twist of faith, they both moved to Delhi to study computer science engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

Career

After graduating with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, Binny Bansal worked 9 months for Amazon and 1.5 years for the Sarnoff Corporation. At Sarnoff, he developed a lane sensor device that would make a sound to alert the driver when he or she changed lanes without signalling.

Bansal applied for jobs at Google twice, but was rejected both times.

Originally, Bansal & Bansal had plans to build a comparison search engine, but they soon realized that there was too little e-commerce in India. That gave them the idea to create a platform that would make e-shopping more readily available in the country.

Binny Bansal left Amazon in 2007 to found the e-commerce company Flipkart. He was Flipkarts Chief Operating Officer (COO) until 2016 when he became Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Since January 2017, he has been Flipkart’s Group CEO.

In 2015, his estimated net worth was 1.3 billion USD, making him one of the top-100 riches people in India.

Sachin Bansal

Early life

Sanchin Bansal was born on August 5, 1981. His father was in business and his mother a homemaker.

Just like his business partner Binny Bansal, he grew up in Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab and Haryana in northern India. Although sharing the same last name, Binny and Sanchin are not from the same family.

Sanchin Bansal scored an All India Rank 49 in the Indian Institutes of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE), an annual engineering college entrance examination in India.

Bansal is an engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, from which his future business partner Binny Bansal also graduated.

Originally, Sanchin Bansal wanted to be a professional gamer.

Career

After obtaining his degree in engineering, Sanchin Bansal worked a few months for Techspan. In 2006, he became a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon.com India, and he soon managed to get Binny Bansal to join him there.

The two Bansals didn’t stay long with Amazon until they decided to quit their jobs to start their own business. Initially they had plans to build a comparison search engine, but when they realized how small the e-commerce market was in India they founded the e-commerce platform Flipkart instead.

In 2015, his estimated net worth was 1.3 billion USD, making him one of the top-100 riches people in India.

Sanchin Bansal was replaced as CEO of Flipkart by Binny Bansal in 2016.