South Park Commons (SPC), the San Francisco-headquartered early-stage venture capital (VC) fund, has opened its first office outside of the US in Bengaluru in collaboration with Flipkart Co-founder Binny Bansal.
Founded in 2016 by Ruchi Sanghvi—the first female engineer at Facebook—SPC will aim to back Indian tech startups predominantly in the artificial intelligence (AI) space as it looks to harness India’s technical talent pool.
SPC, which follows a differentiated model of backing tech startups, has raised $1.5 billion across two funds and has funded 150 startups. An India-specific fund is also on the cards for the VC fund.
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SPC’s USP lies in the fact that it brings together the technical community, where they can brainstorm ideas that can be turned into a business venture. This falls into its philosophy of -1 to 0, which means looking at proposals, which are just on paper.
“We will back entrepreneurs who want to tackle big ideas,” said Aditya Agarwal, a core member at SPC.
This would also see active participation from Binny Bansal, both as an investor and mentor, to any of the potential startups. “We will see how we can support these entrepreneurs and try things out that make it into a reality,” Bansal said.
At present, SPC is in the process of hiring certain partners for the firm and expanding its technical community base.
However, SPC did not mention how much it plans to invest in each tech startup, although it typically invests around $1 million in each company.
“SPC supports founders when they are most vulnerable; when they take the plunge to start a company. We are excited to bring together the most talented technical founders in Bengaluru and help them find their life’s work,” said Sanghvi.
SPC’s core team believes there is a deep technical talent pool in India, and the Indian startup ecosystem has reached a maturity where it can attempt to tackle very ambitious ideas. At the same time, the VC fund aims to build cross-border linkages between the startup ecosystems of the US and India.
The SPC model requires a critical mass of top-quality technical talent, seasoned operators from successful local companies, and a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. It believes Bengaluru has all the ingredients to become the next leading technology hub.
According to the VC, the earliest members of SPC included founders from companies like Anthropic and Imbue, as well as early engineers from OpenAI.
Edited by Suman Singh
