Twitter co-founder Biz Stone backs Indian college dropout turned MIT top innovator

Indian startup Lookup, a Craiglist cum WhatsApp for local businesses, just got another big backer. Co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone today revealed he has invested in this eight-month-old startup’s series A round. The funding amount was not disclosed.

Excited to join @deepakravindran in his next act, @lookup_ Such an amazing person and inspiring entrepreneur. http://t.co/kuVMO1hFae

— Biz Stone (@biz) May 20, 2015

Lookup’s founder Deepak Ravindran is thrilled over Stone’s entry. “His beliefs and ideals are fascinating. I am glad that someone so altruistic, with such a genuine moral compass, is a mentor and advisor to me and my company,” Ravindran says.

Starting up at 17

The young Indian entrepreneur has an interesting history. At 17, he started a web design company. At 19, he dropped out of engineering college to join an accelerator program at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad. At 22, he built an offline search engine called SMSGyan, which allows its 120 million users to text question and get answers immediately, without the luxury of internet on their mobile phones. By 23, he was an angel investor, an MIT “Top Innovator” under 35, and had kicked off Startup Village in Kerala, an incubator program that propelled Kochi into becoming one of the top startup hubs in India.

A few years later, he gave away the source code of SMSGyan, built another app, this time for the US market, and bagged seed funding from 500 Startups and angel investors. This didn’t take off like his earlier app which was profitable right from the start, but opened up new possibilities which led to Lookup.

See: College dropout turned MIT top innovator rolls Craigslist and WhatsApp into one app for local shopping in India

For Ravindran, Biz Stone’s investment in Lookup is “like getting another opportunity to blazon the world with innovation.” He cherishes Stone’s nugget of advice: “Competing is to try my hardest to make an awesome product that people think is valuable, so they tell everyone about it.”