Why is Sachin Bansal taking Navi public?
The three-year-old fintech seems to think a listing will boost its chances of getting a bank licence. Does it stand a chance, given its missteps?
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Editor's note: When Sachin Bansal cashed out of Flipkart with a billion dollars in the summer of 2018, the entrepreneur had made it clear he didn’t want to set up another startup. In November that year, inspired by the HDFC Bank app crash, he got his next big idea: to build a digitally oriented financial services conglomerate. He launched Navi Technologies in December of that year. Three years on, Navi is nowhere close to being a conglomerate. It operates through a network of subsidiaries, most of which it acquired over the same three years. On Saturday, Navi Technologies filed a draft red herring prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Board of India to raise Rs 3,330 crore in an initial public offering. In the process of doing so it has completely chucked the template adopted by every Indian startup, having raised next to no money from private investors before doing an IPO. The 40-year-old Bansal owns 97.39% of the company. It has stitched together businesses ranging from home loans to insurance to mutual funds, but much of that happened in 2021 and …
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