Abu Dhabi Investment Authority ie ADIA is going to take a stake in Lenskart. According to a Bloomberg report, the sovereign wealth fund is finalizing an agreement to buy a mixture of existing Lenskart shares and new equity for $500 million (about Rs 4,000 crore). After this deal, the valuation of Lenskart will cross $ 4 billion.
Investors such as KKR & Co, SoftBank Group Corp, Temasek Holdings Pte and PremjiInvest also have stakes in Lenskart. Piyush Bansal started Lenskart in 2010 along with Amit Chowdhary. Lenskart sells eyewear glasses and lenses leveraging technology. Bansal is also planning to bring Initial Public Offering ie IPO within 48 months.
Piyush used to work in America's tech company Microsoft. He came back to India in the year 2007 to do something new. His decision upset his parents, but Piyush continued to search for work of his choice. He first started the search portal MyCampus.com. On this website, students used to get information about accommodation, books, carpool services and part-time jobs.
Seeing the success of online businesses, they decided to do many experiments together and started online platforms like lenskart.com, jewelry.com, watchkart.com, and bags.com. After a while, based on the customer feedback on all these platforms, they started focusing more on lenskart.com.
Today Lenskart has offline stores in all major cities of India. Piyush believes that if you are an entrepreneur then there will struggle in your life, but it will depend on you to what extent you want to move ahead and how important it is for you to reach the top. Piyush advises young entrepreneurs not to think of themselves as the boss from day one.