1. FLIPKART

As of October 2015:Latest valuation:$15.0b (April 2015)Location: Bangalore, IndiaFounded in 2007CEO: Sachin Bansal (co-founder)Competitors: Ebay, Amazon, Snapdeal.com

India’s largest retailer by sales continues to follow a similar business trajectory as Amazon.com Inc., where its two founders once toiled.Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, who are unrelated but share the same last name, both worked at Amazon Web Services in Bangalore before teaming up to develop an e-commerce site for Indians with about $6,000 saved from their earnings at Amazon.Like Amazon did before it in the U.S., Flipkart Internet Pvt. got its start selling books because the prices were low and the damages from shipping were minimal.Later, the portal started selling electronics before it transformed into a retail platform for small and large businesses to sell their products. In 2013, Flipkart also expanded into selling its own branded products such as tablet PCs and wearable gadgets, a business model similar to Amazon. By early 2015, Flipkart had 22 million registered users and hosted 3,000 merchants selling millions of products, from electronics to clothes and sporting goods.Though Flipkart has emerged as a giant retailer in India, it is losing money every day from undercutting even the prices of what the brands would originally offer to retailers. Flipkart has also had its share of failures too: It started a music service and then shut it down couple of years ago. It also started its own payment services and then rolled it back. The company has declined to provide reasons for the moves.The biggest challenge for Flipkart is addressing the Indian market. While it has been successful in implementing cash-on-delivery and sales through its mobile apps even to the smallest towns in India, it is having to manage outsourced delivery personnel, who get paid a fraction of the cash collected from consumers. Flipkart also faces competition at home from Snapdeal.com, another marketplace.

2. ANI TECHNOLOGIES (OLA CABS)

As of October 2015:Latest valuation:$5.0b (September 2015)Location: Mumbai, IndiaFounded in 2011CEO: Bhavish Aggarwal (co-founder)Competitors: Uber, TaxiSure, Meru Cabs

In early 2011, two alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay started a Web-based car-rental site that let users call for taxis online. But Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati had bigger ambitions: to become the Uber of India.A few months later, Ola moved its services to an app on Google Inc.’s Android platform to take advantage of an increase in smartphone users and lower fees to access the mobile Web.The Ola app connects people who want rides with drivers of taxis and auto rickshaws, motorized tricycles that are one of India's most popular modes of transportation. The app offers access to more than 75,000 cars in more than 50 locations that include all of India's major metropolitan areas as well as many smaller towns. Ola, which is incorporated as ANI Technologies, makes money by charging a commission of 20% on every booking.The company said in early 2015 its service was handling an average of about 200,000 rides per day across some 50 cities, as well as around 100,000 booking requests per day for official black taxis and auto rickshaws in Mumbai city. The company looks to be running in some 200 cities by the end of the year.Ola’s ultimate goal is to make travel by taxis cheaper for Indian consumers than owning cars, says Mr. Aggarwal, the company’s CEO, who decided to rely on Ola's services himself rather than buy a car. Before starting Ola, Mr. Aggarwal worked for two years with the research unit of Microsoft Corp., as an assistant researcher. While there, he got two patents related to mobile phones and networking, and published three papers on home networking in international journals.He says the company’s main challenge is getting trained and well-mannered drivers. But Ola also faces a slew of competitors including Uber Technologies Inc., which is trying to push into the country despite battles with regulators.

3. ZOMATO MEDIA

As of October 2015:Latest valuation:$1.0b (March 2015)Location: New Delhi, IndiaFounded in 2008CEO: Deepinder Goyal, co-founderCompetitors: Yelp, Foodpanda

Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah decided to strike it out on their own in 2008 with a restaurant search and discovery site called Foodiebay.com, after an experiment to put restaurant menus online in their previous office turned out to be a big hit.Mr. Goyal and Mr. Chaddah, who started their careers as management consultants at Bain & Co., saw that ordering in at lunch was a tedious process—often having to skim through a stack of restaurant menus. To make things easier, Mr. Goyal scanned the menus and put them on an office intranet much to the appreciation of his colleagues.In 2010, the duo renamed the company Zomato –a search and discovery site that provides in-depth information, including scanned menus and photos, user reviews and ratings, for over 1 million restaurants across 22 countries.

The company offers six services: restaurant search; an app for restaurants to manage their pages on the site; an online ordering system; table reservations; a payments system; and cloud-based software that allows restaurant owners to manage inventories.Zomato makes money throughadvertising, by charging restaurant owners a fee for its business app, and by charging commissions for payments and orders.As of May 2015, the company’s India and UAE businesses were profitable. It expects to be profitable in markets such as Qatar, South Africa, Philippines, New Zealand, Turkey and Indonesia in the next six to 12 months.Zomato, which had 1,400 employees globally as of May, says its greatest challenge is to find skilled software professionals that fit into its organisational culture. The company is planning to double the headcount in 12 to 15 months.

4. SNAPDEAL

As of October 2015:Latest valuation:$5.0b (August 2015)Location: New Delhi, IndiaFounded in 2010CEO: Kunal Bahl (co-founder)Competitors: Co-founders Rohit Bansal, left, and Kunal Bahl

Snapdeal was founded in 2010 by childhood friends Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal as a coupon site similar to Groupon Inc. In 2011, it shifted its business model to become an online marketplace selling everything from clothing, accessories, and electronics to homes.It is India’s largest online marketplace with about 150,000 merchants selling on its site as of August 2015.Snapdeal connects buyers and sellers similar to eBay Inc. and charges a commission from the merchants. The site lists more than 15 million products in more than 500 categories from regional, national as well as international brands and retailers. It delivers to more than 5,000 cities across India.Snapdeal says its sales through its websites grew six times in 2014 from the year before, making it the fastest growing e-commerce company in India. It has a leading position in the mobile e-commerce space with more than 60% of its orders coming through mobile phones. Mr. Bahl, the CEO, comes from an engineering background and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. Mr. Bansal, the chief operating officer, has a computer engineering degree from India and comes from a financial background having worked at U.S-based Capital One. He managed data-backed analytical projects to improve Capital One's acquisition strategy

5. QUIKR

As of October 2015:Latest valuation:$1.0b (September 2014)Location: Mumbai, IndiaFounded in 2005CEO: Pranay Chulet, founderCompetitors: Rediff LocalAds, Sulekha, Click.in, Olx.in, ClickIndia, HTClassifieds.com

Pranay Chulet took inspiration from the U.S. online classifieds platform Craigslist to launch an Indian version that helps people connect with each other to buy or sell goods and services.In 2007, Mr. Chulet, a film buff, produced a video game in the style of a feature film called “Latent Lava” in the U.S. The cast and crew of the movie were hired through Craigslist which gave Mr. Chulet the confidence to start something similar in India.His last stint at Booz Allen Hamilton as a consultant where he worked closely with U.S. print publishers battered by the rise of online classified portals also offered an insight into the online classifieds industry.As of May 2015, Quikr has 12 million listings, with 30 million unique users, and processes 20 million transactions every month. The company has a presence in 1,000 cities across India.Quikr makes money by charging users a fee for premium listings on its site, by providing leads to users and through advertising. The company has yet to turn a profit.Mr. Chulet graduated from the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata in 1996 and started his career as a consultant at Mitchell Madison Group, a strategy consulting firm. Later, he shifted to Walker Digital, an incubator of U.S. online travel site Priceline Group, where he worked as a business head before joining Booz Allen Hamilton.