South Park Commons (SPC), a California-based technical community for startup founders, is raising $40 million (about Rs 340 crore) for an India-focussed fund to invest in early-stage ventures.
The startup community has established the South Park Commons India Fund to invest in early-stage Indian companies, as per a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
SPC, founded by former Facebook engineers Ruchi Sanghvi and Aditya Agarwal, forayed into India in June last year after teaming up with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. In September, it appointed Prateek Mehta as a partner in Bengaluru to lead SPC India, its first community location outside the US. Mehta previously co-founded Scripbox and Upwardly, grew Myntra and helped expand Angel One, according to SPC.
The community, which derives the name from a neighbourhood in Los Angeles, California, was founded in 2015. It provides support and network to founders at the inception stage.
Agarwal previously told VCCircle that it planned to set up an India-specific fund to invest in early-stage startups, disbursing up to $1 million on average across two tranches of $400,000 and $600,000. It will take invest in pre-seed and seed startups and pick up a stake ranging between 10% and 12%.
The Silicon Valley-based platform for founders was set up by husband-wife duo Sanghvi and Agarwal, who were among the first engineers at Facebook. Sanghvi was the first female engineer at the social media giant.
The couple joined file-sharing company Dropbox after they sold Cove, a company they founded in 2011. Sanghvi was VP of operations while Agarwal was CTO and VP of engineering at Dropbox.
SPC was founded in 2015 and launched its first fund in 2018 with a corpus of $50 million. Its next fund was launched in 2021 and had a corpus of $150 million. Through the two funds, the community has invested in over 150 startups, which include Replit, Airtable, Cure.fit, Rocket Learning, among others.
The network now claims to have more than 700 members from over 150 professional and academic groups. SPC partners have operated and sit on the boards of companies collectively valued over $1 trillion, as per its website.
