← Back to Brewed Up Insights
8%

of what SoftBank's fund paid, returned at AceVector's IPO price

SoftBank's AceVector bet lost 92% of its value on IPO

Markets No. 53 9 October 2026 · 2 min read

AceVector, which owns Snapdeal, got listed on 5 October 2026. In its IPO, 13 of its existing shareholders sold some of their shares to the public: 4.16 crore shares in all, at ₹32 each, or about ₹133 crore.

For most early investors, an IPO is a chance to cash out. But for SoftBank, it meant taking a big loss. AceVector's prospectus shows the average price each shareholder paid for its shares.

Starfish, a Singapore company owned by SoftBank Group, paid ₹382.40 per share on average. It sold those shares at ₹32, getting back just 8% of what it paid. FIH Business Global paid ₹762.60 and got back just 4%. Both have held their shares since 2015. Early investor Kenneth Stuart Glass paid ₹5.90 per share and sold at 5.4 times his cost.

The founders, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Kumar Bansal, did not sell any shares. Their shares cost ₹3.26 and ₹3.68 per share on average.

Starfish sold about 20% of its holding for about ₹88 crore. It cannot sell its remaining 11.31 crore shares for at least 6 months. The stock closed its first day at ₹26.08, 18.5% below the ₹32 IPO price. By 8 October, it had recovered to ₹29.12.

This matters because the IPO price can hide very different outcomes for different shareholders. For SoftBank, the IPO turned part of its huge loss into a real loss. The loss on the remaining shares is still on paper though.

The business has also changed since SoftBank first invested. Unicommerce, AceVector's software business for online sellers, made up 40% of revenue in the year to March 2026, up from 27% in the year to March 2024. It also made ₹41 crore in adjusted EBITDA, while the Snapdeal marketplace lost ₹50 crore.

SoftBank got back ₹8 of every ₹100 it paid for AceVector

Out of every ₹100 each seller paid for its shares, how much came back at the ₹32 IPO price. 10 of the 13 sellers lost money.

Bars showing, out of every ₹100 each seller paid for AceVector shares, how much came back at the ₹32 IPO price: FIH Business Global ₹4, Nexus Ventures III ₹8, SoftBank's Starfish ₹8, Nexus Opportunity Fund ₹15, 5 smaller sellers ₹69, Jason Ashok Kothari ₹79.

AceVector abridged prospectus and Red Herring Prospectus (SEBI) · Sep 2026

Sources