In December 2025 Flipkart Internet received an in-principle go-ahead from the National Company Law Tribunal to shift its domicile from Singapore to India—a move that signals a potential IPO. However, Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy says an IPO is not on his personal timeline, and he would rather spend time building a predictable business for the long run. He is clear about his role as the “management” of Flipkart, doing what it takes to make the company successful.
“It is not my timeline. We are the management of the business. The board must decide on the timing, what to do, and how to do it. I must get the company ready for a new set of accountabilities and responsibilities, and I continue to do that along with my management team,” Krishnamurthy tells Forbes India in an interview at his Bengaluru home.
Having spent nearly a decade in the company, he has steered the ecommerce platform from a “startup” to a market-ready online retail behemoth with support from the company’s largest stakeholder, Walmart.
The former Tiger Global executive, who had a short stint as the CFO of Flipkart in 2014, returned to the company in 2016, and took over the reins of Group CEO in 2018 from co-founder Binny Bansal. Since then, Flipkart has seen multiple changes in leadership and strategy as it was led by founder-operators Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal to its current management.
Krishnamurthy is focussed on building a “future-proof” Flipkart which is AI-first, and focussed on the growing cohort of young internet-first shoppers in India. Edited excerpts from an interview:
Q. How has Flipkart evolved over the last three years and what are your areas of focus?
In the last few years, we have focussed on future-proofing the company. We have focussed on building a business that is a lot more predictable. A predictable business, strong customer value proposition, a strong management team focussed on governance, and an ethical and compliant business—this is what we have.
We have been not just adopters of technology, we have been disruptors, and we take pride in bringing technology to the country. We are building an AI-first Flipkart; we must make sure that each aspect of the business—customer-facing, seller-facing, logistics, corporate functions—is AI-enabled.
The other part comes from the fact that India’s Gen Z population is adapting to AI fast. So, how do we make sure we become a destination for them. There are 350 to 400 million young people empowered with technology and access to information, and Flipkart is a product of that.
These trends will differentiate who wins the Indian customer. The long-term winner [in ecommerce] will be agile, because young Indian consumers keep changing and want newness. The number one determinant of agility and adaptability will be whoever is most AI-enabled.
Q. When did you start focusing on these goals?
At the highest level, we saw these trends three to four years ago and have stuck to them. When we meet customers, if we learn something new, we quickly change. For example, when we saw the behaviour of Gen Z customers, we quickly adapted to that. We choose our priorities and once we go after it, we are at it. We are mentally prepared that some of these could take possibly 10 years to get to, but we keep at it.
Flipkart is a customer-first organisation, and my colleagues and I meet customers every month. If the person talking to us is a parent, they will bring their kids into the conversation and we realised that the kid, who is usually Gen Z, uses a different language for what they are looking for. So, we started using AI to surface the most relevant listings tailored to the individual from over 200 million listings. We brought these to product discovery, product recommendations to make the customer happy.
Similarly, we have 2 million sellers, and, on average, a seller facility has typically 40 to 60 employees. We want the sellers to focus on improving their designs and making products more affordable. For a seller, how do we use AI for ease of doing business? A simple example is image enhancement; the sellers do not have sophisticated studios, and we have technology to enhance the videos and images they take or improve the text.
We want to make sure that the cost of operations continues to go down so that sellers can be more profitable on ecommerce, and we are making big investments in this.
Q. How much headroom does Flipkart have for growth? Isn’t quick commerce overtaking ecommerce?
Look at the macros today: There are customer segments and categories where there is a lot of room for ecommerce penetration. For example, beauty care, fashion and consumables; all these have a large room to grow. Travel is another category where young people in India are spending.
There are customer segments that want certain categories at a particular speed, and we offer that. We are not a quick commerce company, but we are making sure that every consumer gets what they want. For some it is speed for certain occasions—in 10 minutes, four hours or the same day—some want a particular type of value, some want different price points, and we cater to all that. We are not boxed into a particular customer segment or way of delivery. My job is to make sure that our user base of 500 million-plus is getting what it wants from the catalogue size of 200 million.
Quick commerce for us is a way of fulfilling an order, not a business model. If you are building it right, any business takes investments. We have built a supply chain in India across 22,000 serviceable PIN codes and it was built with investments in operations and technology that powers millions of orders a day. So, it is not a particular fulfilment model that is taking more investment or less.
Customers buy consumables, essentials, and want them quickly, and we are offering it to them.
Q. How did you convince Walmart to invest in quick commerce since they don’t have an equivalent in the US?
Our stakeholders operate a strong partnership framework. They understand India extremely well. They are nuanced and local in their thinking. They understand and acknowledge our strategy, our operating plan and our financial plans. We did not see a challenge in it.
Q. How are you preparing for the IPO and what is the timeline?
We are not building this company just for an IPO, and it is not a destination for me personally. The way I look at it is: Are we ready for the responsibilities and stakeholder complexity once we are public and are we ready with a future-proof business? To me, what happens after an IPO is more important. For that, we need a strong leadership team, a predictable business that is not dependent on a particular customer segment, category or individuals.
Our focus areas were not built with IPO as a goal; we have made tremendous investments in ethics and compliance, and it is paying off. It is not that an IPO is coming and I need to do something different.
First Published: Feb 25, 2026, 14:14
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