Anand Chandrasekaran, who recently quit as CPO of Snapdeal, is now actively pursuing his entrepreneurial journey as an angel investor. He has shown vested interest in six startups, namely Truce, MagicX, Lucideus, LoanCircle, Lernr and Rupeek.
Further, he also plans to invest in another three to five startups by the end of this year. The financial details for the announced transactions are currently under wraps, but we’ll update you once we have the information. However, looking at the previous investment deals by Anand, it seems that he typically invests around $25,000 in each entity.
Chandrasekaran who has a knack for entrepreneurship, is now shifting focus towards investing in budding entrepreneurs and radical ideas. Since leaving his position at Snapdeal, he has met with over 200 startups and has over 15 of them to add to his growing portfolio.
Anand currently has active personal investments in Indian startups like Pluss, Innerchef among many others. His latest investments include — Truce, an agri-focused hyperlocal delivery startup with investment positions from Snapdeal’s top management, now including Chandrasekaran.
MagicX is an AI powered chat-based personal assistant, who has recently raised funding from Kris Gopalakrishnan and others. Lucideus founded by Saket Modi in 2012, provides IT Risk Assessment and Digital Security Services.
LoanCircle is a platform that helps users acquire quick personal loans. Last year, it raised angel funding from Zishaan Hayath and others. He is also investing into another fintech startup — Rupeek, which provides gold loans at your doorsteps. While Lernr is an education technology platform and offers classes for IIT-JEE, PMT, Boards, etc.
Previous Endeavours
Anand Chandrasekaran is a co-founder of mobile applications software company Aeroprise Inc. It became the most-deployed solution for mobile service management worldwide. It raised over $7M in funding and was later acquired by BMC Software in 2011.
Chandrasekaran instead of busting his time on setting up another business was poached by Yahoo. There, he worked on the partnership with Yelp and its integration into Yahoo Search.
Later, in 2014, he moved to India to work as a Chief Product Officer at Bharti Airtel. At Airtel, he played key role in building products such as My Airtel, Airtel Money and Wynk Music.
In 2015, he was picked by Snapdeal to bolster their product offerings and compete with the market dominator, Flipkart and Amazon. At the e-commerce firm, he ran technology initiatives and worked on products such as Freecharge, Shopo, post-product customer experience, etc.
A Stanford alumni, Anand did his B.S. in Communications Engineering from PSG College of Technology. He was also awarded the title of Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
In order to keep his investments independent, he has stayed away from angel networks. He says,
I got into angel investing to learn about new exciting areas where startups are setting up companies. If I purely follow what other people are doing, I would rob myself of opportunities.
