News on Medial

South Park Commons enters India in collaboration with Binny Bansal

Entrackr · 1y ago

Medial

South Park Commons (SPC), the technical community and early-stage venture fund, has announced the opening of its first international location (outside the US) in Bengaluru in collaboration with Flipkart’s co-founder Binny Bansal. Founded in 2015 by Ruchi Sanghvi, the first female engineer at Facebook and former VP of operations at Dropbox, SPC will provide a supportive environment for the country’s startup founders, technologists, and researchers to navigate the early stage of their careers. Sanghvi was joined by Aditya Agarwal, former CTO of Dropbox, with the founding of the SPC Fund in 2018. The community has existing locations in San Francisco and New York City. “You can feel the tailwinds here. The Indian startup ecosystem has matured to the point that it can sustain the incredible talent density that makes SPC work. Founders don’t have to move to the US to build world-class, category-creating companies,” said Agarwal. The SPC model requires a critical mass of world-class technical talent, operators from successful local companies, and a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. As per the company, Bengaluru has all the ingredients to become the next leading technology hub. The earliest members of SPC included future founders from companies like Anthropic and Imbue, as well as early engineers from OpenAI. SPC aims to replicate this emphasis in India. The firm also said that it will build on the community’s reputation as a top destination for early-stage AI researchers and founders. Recently, Sanghvi disclosed that SPC is also evaluating its expansion into the UK. As per a Moneycontrol report, SPC has closed its third fund. However, it did not disclose the corpus size. SPC’s first fund worth $50 million was launched in 2018 while it launched its second fund worth $150 million in 2020. SPC is also planning an India dedicated fund to back emerging startups.