All Four Founders Quit Snapdeal-Owned Unicommerce
Founders of Snapdeal-owned Unicommerce quit Snapdeal.
All four co-founders of Snapdeal’s e-commerce management firm Unicommerce have quit nearly two years after the online retailer acquired the venture for an undisclosed amount.
Co-founders Ankit Pruthi, Karun Singla, Vibhu Garg and Manish Gupta quit in August. Snapdeal confirmed the exits. Pruthi, Singla and Garg also confirmed the development to BloombergQuint over the phone. Gupta didn’t respond to BloombergQuint’s calls.
“We had mutually agreed as part of the sale transaction that we will continue to be a part of Snapdeal for over two years, and that period has now ended,” said Garg. “After a short break, we aim to start something of our own again,” added Pruthi.
Unicommerce founders’ exit comes just weeks after parent Snapdeal’s sale talks with bigger rival Flipkart failed after months of back-and-forth. The online retailer’s largest investor Softbank Group, which was pushing for the deal, then invested nearly $2.5 billion in Flipkart.
Snapdeal also sold its digital wallet FreeCharge to Axis Bank for about $60 million.
Last month, Snapdeal elevated Kapil Makhija and Ankit Khandelwal as chief executive officer and chief operational officer, respectively, of Unicommerce. Makhija was previously head of strategy and operations, while Khandelwal was vice president at Unicommerce.
Founded in 2012, Unicommerce is a software as a service (SaaS)-based application for end-to-end management of order fulfillment. Makhija said Unicommerce had a profitable first quarter and the platform is now used for nearly 20 percent of the e-commerce transactions in the country.
The firm is exploring select overseas markets where sellers have expressed interest in adopting the Unicommerce technology solutions, he said.