South Park Commons, a Silicon Valley collective of engineers, founders and researchers, spent six months after entering the South Asian market in June, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last year. is raising India-specific funds. week. The exact size of the fund has not yet been determined, but the listing has set a goal of $40 million.
Founded in 2016 by Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook's first female engineer, South Park Commons expanded to India last year in partnership with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. The Bangalore-based India branch was the first global move for the platform, which has raised three funds to support early-stage startups in the United States.
In 2018, Sanghvi was joined by her husband and business partner Aditya Agarwal. She previously worked as VP of Engineering at Dropbox.
Unlike traditional VC funds and incubators like Y Combinator, South Park Commons seeks technologists with strong ideas but who may not be ready to raise money yet. As stated in the company's FAQ, it is a “-1 to 0” stage. The collective operates two different programs. One is a community membership for entrepreneurs who aren't looking to raise capital, and the other is a Founder Fellowship, which supports founders with a total of $1 million in funding ($400,000 investment upon joining the program and the next venture round). and an additional $600,000 in commitments).
South Park Commons has approximately 175 active members and more than 800 alumni, according to the South Park Commons website. About 80% are founders and the rest are domain experts and researchers.
In September, the group hired Angel One Managing Director and CBO Prateek Mehta as founding partner for its India base.
India overall is a challenging market for startups. According to government data, the country has more than 149,000 startups, but only 117 unicorns (startups valued at more than $1 billion). This has convinced global VC funds such as Accel, General Catalyst and Lightspeed to remain bullish on the Indian ecosystem, while others such as SoftBank and Tiger Global have found it difficult to do so. I feel it. Y Combinator has also selected only four Indian startups for the winter and summer batches of 2024, down from eight in 2023 and 47 in 2022.
Sanghvi and Agarwal did not immediately respond to requests for comment.