At the dawn of 2017, India’s biggest e-commerce marketplace Flipkart got a new chief executive. The Bengaluru-based firm appointed its investor Tiger Global’s executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy as its CEO and made co-founder and CEO Binny Bansal group CEO in a major organisational restructuring.
This was widely seen as a big investor taking control of its investee startup. As Tiger Global’s representative, Krishnamurthy was seen commanding significant influence over the affairs at Flipkart in the second phase of his stint which originally began in June 2016 when he joined the firm as head of category design organisation.
The spotlight turned to Krishnamurthy as to whether he would be able to turn around the fortunes of Flipkart which has been making huge losses since launch.
The ecommerce veteran, who had previously worked with eBay at senior roles in the finance function, keeps a low profile and has rarely interacted with the media.
Towards the end of the year, as Tiger Global made a partial exit from Flipkart, there were social media rumours that Krishnamurthy is on his way out. On 6 December 2017, Flipkart vehemently denied these rumours.
