South Park Commons, a Silicon Valley collective of engineers, founders, and researchers, is raising an India-specific fund over six months after entering the South Asian market in June, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week. The exact size of the fund is yet to be determined, though the listing sets the target at $40 million.
Founded by Facebook’s first female engineer, Ruchi Sanghvi, in 2016, South Park Commons entered India last year by partnering with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. The India chapter, based in Bengaluru, was the first global move of the platform that raised three funds to back early-stage startups in the U.S.
In 2018, Sanghvi was joined by her husband and business partner, Aditya Agarwal, who previously worked at Dropbox as its VP of engineering.
Unlike traditional VC funds and incubators like Y Combinator, South Park Commons looks for technologists who have strong ideas but may not be ready to fundraise yet — the “-1 to 0” stage, as the company says in its FAQ. The collective runs two different programs: Community Membership for entrepreneurs who are not looking to raise capital, and Founder Fellowship to back founders with total funding of $1 million ($400,000 investment upon joining the program and an additional $600,000 commitment for the next venture round).
South Park Commons has around 175 active members and over 800 alumni, per its website. Around 80% are founders, while the rest are domain experts and researchers.
In September, the group hired Angel One executive director and CBO Prateek Mehta as its founding partner for the India outpost.
India has been a challenging market for startups overall. The country, home to over 149,000 startups, per the government data, has only 117 unicorns — the startups with at least a $1 billion valuation. It convinced global VC funds including Accel, General Catalyst, and Lightspeed to continue bullish on the Indian ecosystem, while others like SoftBank and Tiger Global have found it challenging. Y Combinator also selected just four startups from India across its winter and summer batches in 2024, down from 8 in 2023 and 47 in 2022.
Sanghvi and Agarwal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
