South Park Commons, a group of Silicon Valley engineers, founders and researchers, is raising a dedicated fund for India for six months after entering the South Asian market in June, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week. The exact size of the fund has yet to be determined, though the listing puts the goal at $40 million.
Founded by Facebook’s first female engineer, Ruchi Sanghvi, in 2016, South Park Commons entered India last year partnering with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. India’s capital, based in Bangalore, was the first world move of the platform raised three funds to support early-stage startups in the US
In 2018, Sanghvi joined her husband and business partner, Aditya Agarwal, who previously worked at Dropbox as vice president of engineering.
Unlike traditional VC funds and incubators like Y Combinator, South Park Commons is looking for technologists who have strong ideas but may not be ready to raise money yet — the “-1 to 0” stage, such as says the company in its FAQ. The collective runs two different programs: Community Membership for entrepreneurs who do not seek to raise capital, and Founder Fellowship to support founders with a total funding of $1 million ($400,000 investment upon joining the program and an additional $600,000 commitment for the next venture cycle).
South Park Commons has approximately 175 active members and over 800 alumni, per his website. About 80% are founders, while the rest are experts and researchers.
In September the team employee Angel One CEO and CBO Prateek Mehta as Founding Partner for India Outpost.
India has been a challenging market for startups overall. The country where it is located over 149,000 startupsaccording to government data, it has only 117 unicorns — startups with a valuation of at least $1 billion. It convinced global VC funds, including Accel, General Catalyst and Lightspeed, to remain bullish on the Indian ecosystem, while others such as SoftBank and Tiger Global found it challenging. Y Combinator too selected Just four startups from India in all winter and summer batches in 2024, up from 8 in 2023 and 47 in 2022.
Sanghvi and Agarwal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
