Mukund Jha, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Dunzo, is negotiating with Together Fund to raise approximately ₹50–80 crore ($6–10 million) for his new startup.
The fundraising effort follows reports from October 2023 that Jha was departing from the financially struggling hyperlocal company Dunzo.
This funding round occurs as many top executives from various startups are departing to launch their ventures, a trend appealing to both operators and investors. Experienced leaders prefer holding significant equity in their own companies over being minor stakeholders in larger, established startups.
Think of it as an overlap between AI and SaaS. Jha is creating a generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) startup and also wants to automate a lot of the quality assurance (QA) that businesses perform.
Businesses perform quality assurance (QA) checks to make sure a final product is adequate and satisfies their standards for quality. They accomplish this by creating and running tests, identifying faults, and providing feedback.
According to one of the individuals mentioned above, Jha had even gotten in touch with Y Combinator, although it’s unclear if their negotiations would continue.
Questions were not answered by Mukund Jha or the Together Fund.
Jha, who worked at Google in New York from 2015 until 2023, attempted to launch two of his businesses while he was employed there. Jha co-founded Habet, an intelligent goal-tracking software, and Wisdom.ly, a group video platform for online meetings and conferences.
He is raising funds while Dunzo is attempting to put together a round to continue operating despite the company’s declining revenue.
Together Fund was founded in 2021 by Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks, Manav Garg, founder and CEO of Eka Software, and Shubham Gupta, formerly with Matrix Partners India. In its first round, the fund raised $85 million, and in 2023, it announced an increase in its total corpus to $150 million with its second round.
The Together Fund has made investments in more than 20 businesses, including those that are developing new markets like cloud for connected devices and vertical SaaS companies in the healthcare industry, as well as horizontal SaaS application sectors including marketing, sales intelligence, and recruitment.
DhiWise, SpendFlo, SecureDen, and TopLyne are a few of the companies in its portfolio.