Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal invests $12.5 mn in software firm Mobikon

A provider of software platform to restaurants, Mobikon will use the funds to scale in Southeast Asia

Flipkart co-founder and investor Binny Bansal has invested $12.5 million as part of a Series-B round at Mobikon, a seven-year-old software start-up focused on restaurants and food & beverage (F&B) industry.

This is Bansal’s first investment since he shifted his base to Singapore earlier this year. Coincidentally, Mobikon founder and chief executive Samir Khadepaun is also based in Singapore; the company has a presence in India, Singapore and Indonesia.

According to a company statement, this is the largest single cheque that Bansal has written out to a start-up.

Over the past year, Bansal has invested (including follow-on investments) in insurance platform Acko, image-processing firm Terraview and health start-ups SigTuple, Niramai, and Pandorum Technologies, besides putting his money in venture capital firm 021 Capital.

In December, he started a venture called xto10x Technologies with Saikiran Krishnamurthy, who had headed Flipkart’s logistics arm eKart between 2015 and 2017. The company helps early-stage startups build capabilities in functions such as strategy, finance and human resource management, among others.

Bansal, who exited Flipkart a few months after Walmart acquired the company in May 2018, recently sold a major chunk of his shares in the e-commerce firm. He sold less than one per cent of his four per cent shareholding to rack up $76 million in June.

“Mobikon has posted a stellar growth rate in customer acquisition in the past few months, along with demonstrated improvement in key business metrics of portfolio restaurants. Its proposed geographical expansion into Australia and further into Southeast Asia will give it unbeatable market leadership in the restaurant-tech space,” Bansal said in a statement.

Mobikon offers a technology platform to restaurants to manage their customer engagement, marketing and analytics on a single dashboard. It was founded by Khandepaun, a graduate of Pune Institute of Technology and Monash University in Australia, in 2010.

Including the latest round, the start-up has so far raised $25 million from investors like Jungle Ventures, Sistema Asia Fund, C31 Ventures (Singapore), Qualgro and Spring Singapore.

Bansal has made over 30 angel investments since his time at Flipkart, and he still continues to be an active investor.

Meanwhile, his fellow Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal recently bought over microfinance company Chaitanya India Fin Credit; he will drive it as its CEO. Sachin, who has made significant investments in Ola and electric scooter maker Ather, cashed out of Flipkart last year by selling his stake for $1 billion.