Investors back top execs venturing out on their own
MUMBAI : Early-stage investors are increasingly backing CXOs who left established startups to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, relying on their wealth of experience to steer business in challenging times. On Monday, Farid Ahsan, the co-founder of Sharechat who quit six months ago, said he has launched General Autonomy, a startup to help automate factories.
The firm has already found backers in IndiaQuotient and Elevation Capital, who provided $3 million in seed funding. The funding wave of 2021 and the following winter have taught the investors that it is safer to bet on experienced hands.
Some of these executives include Dale Vaz, chief technology officer (CTO) of Swiggy who left to start Aaritya Technologies (a trading company); Shanmugam Krishnasamy, CTO at Freshworks who left to start Smukk (a surplus management software provider); Karthik Gurumurthy, senior vice-president of Swiggy who is to start his own firm in offline space that will mirror Swiggy; Ankur Jain, chief product officer at BharatPe who has left to start his own venture in the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) space; Jaynti Kanani, co-founder, Polygon Technology who left to start two ventures, Morphic and Mozak, in the Generative AI and Web3 space, respectively; Anurag Arjun, co-founder, Polygon Technology who left to start his own venture called Avail Finance (a fintech venture), according to data from Native, an executive search firm. “Around 90% of our portfolio founders have worked in or ran a startup in the past.
In the last couple of years, we are seeing an increasing trend of CXOs of established startups quit to build for themselves. They come with a deeper understanding of the customer problem, have been part of
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