Zolve was founded by Raghunandan G, who co-founded TaxiForSure, a ride-healing startup, that Ola bought for $200M in 2015. Incidentally, Ola shut down TaxiForSure in 2016. The TaxiForSure deal made money for its hashtagfounders and investors, but it didn't work out for Ola. Most acquisitions don't create value for buyers.
Aprameya Radhakrishna, the other co-founder of TaxiForSure, co-founded Koo, a microblogging platform touted as desi Twitter. Unfortunately, Koo recently shut down after raising $60M in hashtagventurecapital from marquee VCs. Patriotism can only take you so far.
Mayank Bidawatka, the other co-founder of Koo, worked as a consultant for TaxiForSure in 2014 before it was sold to Ola. Mayanak, after his TaxiForSure isn't, co-founded GoodBox, a company that helped smaller businesses create their consumer apps. After raising a few million dollars, GoodBox most likely died a quiet death. Its website doesn't work.
Dunzo is another Indian startup that's struggling despite raising $500M in capital. It's a quick commerce startup that has not been able to make hashtagmoney. As per the news, Flipkart will buy Dunzo in a fire sale.
Mukund Jha, one of the co-founders of Dunzo, is now in talks with some VC firms to raise $5–10M for his new Gen AI startup. I believe he'll raise capital from some VC. Koo founders, Aprameya and Mayank, will also raise money for their new hashtagstartups, whenever they intend to do it.
The moral of this story is failures are not bad in the startup industry. Most founders fail. Even successful founders fail in their second startup. But they don't stop building. Many of them build a third one.
We are doing our next Founder Fundraising workshop (an 8-hour Boot Camp) on the weekend (3rd & 4th of August). The link is in the comments.
This post was originally shared by Pushkar Singh on Linkedin.