Accel presents The Founder Stack - Consumer Cohort of ‘21

In November 2020, we kicked off the second edition of Founder Stack and the first cohort of consumer tech startups. Today, we are happy to showcase the cohort to the world.

First, what is Founder Stack?

Founder Stack is a SeedtoScale program for early-stage startup founders to get domain-specific insights from industry thought leaders and practitioners, accelerating the journey to product-market fit and beyond.

You can find out more about our Founder Stack program here.

Over 500 startups applied to the second edition of Founder Stack, which was focused on Consumer Tech. Of these, 11 got into the program.

The 22 founders (varying from the idea to revenue generation stage) commenced their journey on Nov 12th. They went through 12 weeks of learning on market research, product management, user growth, and fundraising. The cohort completed their last session on Feb 4th.

And we can’t wait to show them off to the world.

Let’s go!

Aniket & Shivam are building ingig

Aniket started the program as a solo founder and onboarded Shivam - a friend from his IIT Roorkee days - as a co-founder during the program.

Ingig was born out of a desire to help artists make up for their lost revenue post the pandemic when live shows disappeared. Aniket felt that the sub-par experience of online shows on Zoom called for a fresh take at live online shows. Today, Ingig has hosted 50+ live shows, with 150K+ minutes streamed, and is home to a community of 500+ artists.

Our Founder Stack cohort enjoyed one such live concert on the Ingig platform. 

If you want to check out some fantastic live artist performances, check out https://ingig.live or https://www.instagram.com/ingig.live.

Ajinkya, Abhik, Shashank, Anshul are building Growfix 

The four founders of Growfix are building a platform for businesses to raise retail debt capital.

Ajinkya used to park his money in his father's business and found that many of his friends loved the returns. He quickly realized that retail investors are looking for higher interest rate fixed income products, while companies wanted access to retail capital. Thus was born GrowFix, where retail investors can invest in new assets and earn higher interest for similar risk alternatives.

Growfix launched its first official asset of INR 10 Cr in December ‘20, which was fully subscribed, and is now set to bring out more such assets for retail investors. They’ve raised $2M in funding recently from Rainmatter Capital, Kunal Shah, Sumit Maniyar, and others.

Shankar & Ankit are building Junio

Shankar and Ankit are heavy hitters from the Paytm mafia. They are building a neo bank to digitize pocket money for children and nurture financial knowledge and discipline from an early age. 

During a two-year sabbatical after his Paytm stint, Shankar realized that with most payments happening online, kids were borrowing their parents’ credit cards, and there was no way to monitor this spend. He came up with the idea of launching a prepaid smart card that allows kids to shop offline and online, building a financially empowered younger generation. Junio uses an easy and straightforward interface to bring interactivity with savings, earnings, and understanding of compounding.

They have recently closed a round of $2 Mn from angels, including Kunal Shah, Yashish Dahiya, and Deepak Abbott.

Simran Khara is building Koparo

Simran comes with fifteen years of experience, having worked at McKinsey, Star Network, and served as the CEO of Juggernaut Books. Building on her understanding of the Indian consumer, Simran is creating a safe and natural brand in the personal and home care D2C products space, starting with solutions for the home cleaning market.

With 80+ NPS and a 22% repeat rate, Koparo is already seeing some early PMF signs.

Mohit & Arvind are building Quinn

Mohit started Quinn out of personal frustration - that of dealing with his curly hair. After experimenting with many products, he realized that a better way to figure out what works and what doesn’t is to learn from someone with similar hair care routines. 

So he joined hands with his school friend Arvind to start Quinn, a social network for beauty, starting with hair care. 

Quinn allows users to connect with their hair twins (people having similar hair) to get authentic and personalized advice on achieving their hair goals.

Raghav & Shradha are Raising Superstars

Raghav is a second-time entrepreneur, and along with his wife Shraddha, is looking to revolutionize modern parenting for parents of 0-3-year-olds. 

When Raghav and Shraddha had their baby, Prabal, they researched babies’ activities that would help stimulate his brain development. Raghav came up with a framework that would help unravel the prodigious abilities that every baby is born with. Enthused by the overwhelmingly positive feedback from friends and family with whom they initially shared the solution, the duo decided to productize it and deliver it to parents across the world, and that's how Raising Superstars was born. 

Since then, there has been no looking back for the company, which has quickly acquired a loyal customer base from 25+ countries.

Harsh, Meet & Anshul are building Stamurai

Meet & Anshul have personally battled stuttering. Along with Harsh, a friend from their IIT Delhi days, they started Stamurai with the mission to make speech therapy affordable and accessible for all. 

Starting with ‘stuttering’ as an area of focus, the team is looking to use technology to augment speech therapy. They already have paid customers from 90+ countries and are looking to focus on the US and UK as the key geographies to start with.

‍Aditya & Raj are building Stoa School

Aditya and Raj are graduates of BITS-Pilani and have built education businesses independently. Their mutual interest in building internet-first learning communities brought them together. 

Passionate about making business education affordable for the masses, they decided to build Stoa School. Stoa currently runs cohort-based programs to help mid-career professionals accelerate their careers in business roles.

Saurabh & Siddharth are building Tamasha

Saurabh and Siddarth are both IIT Bombay graduates. Building on Saurabh’s experience working in the gaming and entertainment industry, the two set out to build Tamasha. On this online platform, people can play real-money games hosted by their favorite influencers. 

Tamasha aims to disrupt the booming social gaming industry, giving a new generation of content creators the power to entertain their fans through live games and also monetize them effectively in new and unique ways. 

Launched in December of 2019/20, Tamasha has seen users complete 5 million minutes of engagement with 1500+ live game shows hosted on their platform.

Pramod is building Threado

Pramod is an IIT Kharagpur alumnus and occupied a front-row seat in Zomato’s growth story. After a decade-long experience of building a growth flywheel on the back of content and community engagement, Pramod started Threado with a mission to help brands adopt a community-first approach to scaling their business. 

Threado is an engagement platform that serves as the one-stop solution for brands to manage and grow their online communities. If you are looking to create an engaging community experience for your users without having to juggle between multiple tools, head to https://threado.com. 

Mehak is building Uvi Health

Mehak is a Harvard Grad with a degree in Public Policy and has worked in India and Africa’s impact investing space. 

Interested in using digital healthcare delivery as a medium to help those with chronic conditions, Mehak started Uvi Health. She decided to focus on women's sexual and reproductive health because her research revealed that women in India spend between 2-10 years finding the ‘right gynecologist’ or someone they trust. A shocking 72% of women were still looking.

Today, Uvi offers a science-backed program for PCOS management and reversal, a condition that affects 1 in 5 women in the country. Uvi Health aims to build a future where healthcare is personalized, holistic, and evidence-based. 

Mehak was just one month into her entrepreneurship journey when she joined Founder Stack and has grown Uvi's digital community today to over 3,000 women.

All the best to the founders on their journeys. We are glad to have you as part of the Accel Community.

Also, a heartfelt thanks to all our coaches who invested time and effort to create customized content for the sessions and delivered real masterclasses for the cohort.

What’s next?

Please note that we have decided to open the program content to the whole startup community. The Program Content will be first shared with all the Founder Stack Applicants and then to the entire startup community. We are putting together the videos, tasks & resources for you.

Stay tuned for those. And in the meantime, take care & stay safe.

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