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Ananth Narayanan is no stranger to building ecommerce brands. He was the CEO of Myntra and joined Medlife as Co-founder and CEO, which was later acquired by PharmEasy.

In May 2021, he launched his new venture Mensa Brands, which wants to work with homegrown D2C brands, which generate over 70 percent of their sales online, have an annual revenue range of Rs 10-70 crore, and are profit-generating.

“Mensa aims to partner with the best founders and brands, invest in a majority stake of these brands, and create an operating system for them to scale, which will be a combination of product, technology, and ecommerce expertise,” he tells YourStory.

Last month, it raised approximately $50 million in a Series A round led by Accel Partners, Falcon Edge Capital, Norwest Venture Partners as well as prominent angel investors such as Kunal Shah, Mukesh Bansal, Rahul Mehta of  DST Global, and Scott Shleifer of Tiger Global.

The founding team at Mensa has a combined experience of over 60 years in Indian and global ecommerce, bringing in-house domain expertise in marketplace-native technology, data mining and digital marketing, category management and operations, brand building, and global expansion.

Editor’s Pick: 100X Entrepreneur Podcast

For the last 10 years, Ashvin Chadha, Co-founder of Anicut Capital, has been doing private equity transactions in the consumer and financial services space.

He believes that country is now at a stage where the US was in the 90s or early 2000s — the golden age of early-stage investing. He says that some of the best companies are going to come up in India in the next 10 years. Read more.

Startup Spotlight

Building ‘Facebook and LinkedIn’ for farmers and agri traders

Hailing from a farming family, Rajesh Ranjan quit his job to use technology to make farming transparent and efficient, and connect them with the right people.

In 2019, he got together with Avinash Kumar and Manish Agrawal to start Krishify — a Gurugram-based startup that connects farmers to all agri stakeholders, including fellow farmers, traders, distributors, farm equipment sellers, cattle doctors, transportation service providers, etc. through a single, mobile-first, and vernacular platform. Read more.

News & Updates

Before you go, stay inspired with… 

“We will help their brands grow and scale into a household name by leveraging our sourcing, design, technology, digital marketing and inventory management capabilities.”

— Ananth Narayanan, Founder and CEO, Mensa Brands

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