Bangalore-based Inksedge Infotech Private Limited, which runs an online portal for stationery and personalised cards, has ceased operating, a person in the know told VCCircle.
It is not clear when the startup halted its services but the decision was made in the last three to four months as it was unable to raise follow-on funding, the person mentioned above added.
The company’s website confirms that it has suspended operations while the LinkedIn account of Rohini Chakravarthy, its co-founder and chief executive, says she was associated with the venture until July. Anuja Ranjane, the other co-founder, moved to Walmart’s global e-commerce division as senior product manager in February but she was part of the venture till April, her LinkedIn account shows.
Chakravarthy did not respond to email queries from VCCircle seeking more information on the development.
In December 2014, the startup had raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by US-based early-stage venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). US-based Pinnacle Ventures and Milliways Ventures also participated in the round. Besides, a few individual investors, including Vuclip’s founder and CEO Nickhil Jakatdar and Silicon Valley tech executive Gokul Rajaram, had also invested in the firm.
Inksedge was founded in October 2014 by Chakravarthy and Ranjane, who joined later as part of the founding team. The e-commerce platform offered personalised cards for various occasions like weddings, holidays and birthdays, and also sold stationery. Users could personalise cards according to their tastes like size, occasion, colour, and the number of photos to be printed on it. The cards would then be delivered at the customer’s doorsteps.
The company, which offered about 2,000 products, competed with the likes of Evite and Tinyprints for a pie of the estimated $2-billion global cards industry, a report in The Economic Times in March said.
In India alone, the wedding cards industry, which is largely fragmented, was estimated at $1 billion, Kittu Kolluri, general partner at NEA, had told ET at the time of the fund-raise.
An IIT Madras and MIT Sloan School of Management alumnus, Chakravarthy was formerly a partner at NEA. Prior to that, she worked with technology conglomerate Cisco Systems, the VC arm of chipmaker Intel Capital, and hardware vendor Bay Networks. A masters in computer science from Santa Clara University, Ranjane had earlier founded Zenefic, a voice and messaging service for businesses. In her earlier stints, she worked at companies such as Shutterfly-owned Tinyprints. Prior to that, she worked as a software developer at IT major Infosys.
