Rishen Kapoor, co-founder and former CEO of SaaS startup Toplyne, has rejoined Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA) after his three-and-a-half-year-old venture ceased operations in October.
Toplyne, which helped sales teams at product-led growth companies convert free users into paying customers, shut down as the startup couldn’t reach the scale or product-market fit it was aiming for.
“Peak XV has always felt like home. I’m excited to be back, working with founders building the future,” Kapoor said in a LinkedIn post.
The company had raised over $17 million from backers including Peak XV, Tiger Global, Surge, Together Fund, and angel investors such as Kunal Shah and Harshil Mathur. It had last raised $15 million from investors such as Tiger Global, Peak XV, Together Fund and angel investors from Canva, Vercel and Zoominfo.
"After 3.5 years of building Toplyne, we’ve made the tough decision to wind down operations and return capital to our investors," Kapoor had said in his LinkedIn post in October last year.
Founded by Kapoor, Ruchin Kulkarni, and Rohit Khanna, Toplyne offered actionable insights integrated into products to improve lead conversion rates. It analysed complex patterns in large volumes of product-usage data to identify users and accounts with the highest intent to convert to paid subscriptions and enables growth teams to rapidly experiment with and deploy various go-to-market (GTM) motions at scale.
Kapoor had previously worked at then Sequoia Capital India from January 2019 to June 2021. He was one of the founding team members of Surge, the accelerator programme originally started by the firm.
Previously, he was associated with companies such as Sellics (merged with Perpetua), CleverTap, and Pricebaba.com. He completed his Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical and Master of Business Administration in technology marketing from SVKM's Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies.
