Silicon Valley’s SPC teams up with Binny Bansal for India-focused fund

Bengaluru: South Park Commons (SPC), a Silicon Valley tech startup community and venture fund, on Thursday announced plans to establish a dedicated fund to support entrepreneurship in India.

The San Francisco-based entity's India entry—its first international foray outside the US—is in collaboration with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. 

SPC aims to support early-stage founders right from figuring out a business idea to achieving product-market fit. In the US, it is present in San Francisco and New York.

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SPC founders Ruchi Sanghvi and Aditya Agarwal did not divulge further details about the India-focused fund, but said that it will be actively looking at ideas using emerging technology such as artificial intelligence, while retaining focus on the consumer sector, where it had made some of its earlier bets.

“You can feel the tailwinds here. The Indian startup ecosystem has matured to the point that it can sustain the incredible talent density that makes SPC work. Founders don’t have to move to the US to build world-class, category-creating companies," Aditya said.

Tech Powerhouse

India has solidified its position as a global technology powerhouse with Bengaluru possessing all the “right ingredients” to become the next leading technology hub, the founders said in a statement.

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SPC has invested in Mukesh Bansal’s fitness firm Cult.fit (formerly Curefit), e-commerce platform Meesho, and visa application startup Atlys. SPC manages two funds, one with a $50 million corpus, and the other with $150 million.

SPC typically invests up to $1 million in early-stage ventures in exchange for equity through its fellowship programme, and offers mentorship.

Way Forward

As part of its India strategy, the firm is on the lookout for local partners to handle operations, identify potential founders, and build a community of researchers, technologists and builders. 

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Some of SPC's earliest members include future founders of Anthropic and Imbue, and early engineers from OpenAI. "SPC aims to replicate this emphasis in India," Agarwal said.

Agarwal, the former chief technology officer (CTO) of Dropbox, joined Sanghvi, the first female engineer at Facebook and former vice president of operations at Dropbox, to establish the SPC Fund in 2018 to help technical founders during the early stages of their startup journey.