Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal on Governance

Bahl is co-founder of AceVector Limited, the holding company that now houses Snapdeal, Unicommerce and Stellaro Brands — a structural answer to the question of how the founders reorganise their corporate identity after Snapdeal's failed-unicorn phase.

Bahl holds institutional positions that span policy and industry bodies: member of the National Startup Advisory Council, board of governors at ICRIER, chairman of the CII Startup Committee, former member of the NASSCOM Executive Council, and an independent director at Piramal Enterprises — a profile that places him at the intersection of Indian startup policy and corporate governance.

In 2022, Snapdeal adopted the group corporate identity of AceVector, a holding structure that bundled Snapdeal with Unicommerce and Stellaro Brands — a reorganisation that distanced the e-commerce brand from its failed-unicorn past and reframed the founders as portfolio operators rather than single-business builders.

He has held governance positions across Indian industry: board of governors at ICRIER, member of the NASSCOM executive council, chairman of the CII National Committee on E-commerce, and a seat on the National Startup Advisory Council that advises the Indian government on startup ecosystem building.

Bahl serves as an independent director on the board of Piramal Enterprises — the conglomerate led by Ajay Piramal — and is also a mentor at The Foundery, a venture by Nikhil Kamath and Kishore Biyani that supports early-stage founders, indicating how his post-Snapdeal identity bridges India's traditional promoters and new-age tech founders.

Culture is the third pillar: he argues that team transparency builds trust, which in turn enables the candid conversations required to fix problems during hard times — a lesson sharpened by the wave of senior leadership exits at Snapdeal in 2016–17 when trust between the founders and the leadership team reportedly broke down.

The piece reports SoftBank as the central actor in the failure: the Japanese investor pushed Snapdeal to spend aggressively, declined to make good on repeated promises of fresh capital, blocked other fundraising, and finally cornered the founders into a Flipkart merger — a portrait of how a single large investor can take operational control of an Indian startup's fate.

Compounding the operational collapse was a string of senior exits — Saurabh Bansal (category head), Ashish Chitravanshi (SVP operations), Srinivas Murthy (marketing), Abhishek Kumar (corp dev), Farheen Akhtar (comms), Tony Navin (partnerships) and others left between 2016 and 2017 as the focus shifted repeatedly between GMV, order count and customer satisfaction.

The article flags that Bahl and Bansal were paid Rs 46.5 crore each in FY 2014-15 including stock options — unusually high for founders of a loss-making startup — and that both sold Rs 80 crore of stock each to Ontario Pension Fund in late 2015, a move that did not go down well with the leadership team, particularly since other senior employees were not allowed to liquidate.

The piece frames Nikesh Arora's abrupt June 2016 departure from SoftBank as the moment Snapdeal's safety net was cut: as Arora's mentor relationship with the founders ended, SoftBank's promised follow-on funding stopped, removing the bridge capital that Snapdeal's strategy had been banking on.