She’s an MIT grad and Silicon Valley VC, but she wants to make stationery for Indians. Why is this a smart move?

A techie from MIT, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and now an entrepreneur in India – Rohini Chakravarthy has broken many a glass ceiling. She studied electrical engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, worked on boards, chips, and embedded software with global companies like Cisco, and then became a venture capitalist after an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge. After eight years with Intel Capital, she moved to New Enterprise Associates (NEA), focusing on software and systems investments. She is on the board of top tech startups like Aquantia, Kaazing Corporation, and Vuclip.

But breaking glass ceilings is not the most striking aspect of this high-flyer from Bangalore. Chakravarthy has picked the unlikeliest space you could imagine to begin her innings as an entrepreneur. Her passion for chips has given way to a zeal to make the best designed and personalized greeting cards, wedding invitations, and event stationery available to millions of Indians.

Her two-month-old startup Inksedge is a niche ecommerce site in a disorganized market that is worth billions of dollars. That takes a while to sink in, but even then, it sounds far too simple a project for someone with a background in hardcore technology like her. That is until you hear her personal and professional reasons for starting it up.

It was when she held a traditional Hindu thread ceremony – like a baptism to Christians – for her son in Bangalore last year that the idea for Inksedge sprouted in her mind. She went through the tedious process of getting invitations that suited her taste and realized there was a better way to do it, and that would be online. Nobody was doing this to the scale and quality she had in mind.

“Inksedge is an all digital product till you hit print. It is highly personalized for you, designed for a ‘wow’ customer experience. A lot of technology goes into that,” she says.

What Inksedge attempts to solve is actually a big data problem, according to Chakravarthy. She says that a lot of what people call big data is really about figuring out who wants to buy what, where and why. The Indian market has just got to the point where there are enough internet users to warrant segmentation in ecommerce, she says.

That is really a big data problem. You could pick one category and say if I give you this big set of customers and you have to tell me how are they going to buy this, when are they going to buy this and where, that is a hugely interesting problem to solve. The event stationery segment is interesting because it has four unique pieces: catalog, personalization, customer acquisition, and fulfillment where design comes into play.

A big data company with a pretty skin

I met her in Bangalore yesterday just as she announced closing a US$1.5 million seed round of funding led by NEA. Pinnacle Ventures, Milliways Ventures, and angel investors like Nickhil Jakatdar, Gokul Rajaram, Mark Perry, and Anil Kamath participated in the round.

In a statement announcing the funding, Anand Rajaraman, founding partner at Milliways Ventures, says: “We think of Inksedge as a big data company with a pretty skin. Big data is as much about new data as it is about new algorithms. There are 60 million Indian women using the internet today and the number is growing rapidly. Inksedge is poised to acquire these customers efficiently, tap into this new data set, and discover patterns of consumption that are entirely fresh and differentiated.”