Mayank Bidawatka, who built India’s Twitter rival Koo, raises $4M for his new startup Billion Hearts
Summary
The round has been led by Blume Ventures with participation from General Catalyst and Athera Venture Partners, the company said in a statement.The seed round immediately followed the angel round of around $250,000 the company raised recently from top-tier angels such as Phanindra Sama, ex-co-founder of redBus; Ankit Bhati, ex-co-founder of Ola; Raveen Sastry, ex-co-founder of Myntra; Piyush Shah, Co-founder of InMobi Group, etc.VCs and top tech executives had also backed Billion Hearts angel round including Darshit Vora, Partner at Acherman Capital, Vibhore Sharma, Partner at Capital 2B, Nithin Chandra, Director of Product Management at Facebook, Bhaskar Raju, Engineering Head at Rattle and Nizamabad TiE Angels.Speaking on the seed round, Bidawatka in a LinkedIn post said, Ive always believed that a strong board is as important a pillar as the product, the market and the team. We cared about how a prospective investor felt about the company and the products vision more than the size of their fund.In the process, I respectfully said no to some funds even if they were keen to invest, but didnt have the right amount of belief we were looking for. And while having these conversations, we found the partners that were most excited about what we wanted to do, he said.According to the company, it is currently working on a digital consumer product thats relevant for a global market and audience. The company has already set aside a 25 per cent ESOP pool for its team who started building this without knowing anything about how this will come together.Billion Hearts aims to create digital products for a global user base. While the product is still in stealth, it deals with a wide use case thats relevant for all smartphone users around the world, across age groups.