How these students hooked a Japanese VC with a sexy app to share files between phones

Photo credit: Pixabay.

You know all about chance encounters. You cross paths with a stranger; you get talking; and that stranger upturns your life – for good or for bad. Well, in the case of Akshay Pruthi, a 22-year-old engineering student who had a cool hack to discover music with friends, it’s been all good.

Akshay’s first brush with a “real” CEO – Ankur Warikoo, co-founder of Nearbuy (formerly Groupon India) – changed the course of his life and also his startup’s. In just about half-an-hour, Ankur convinced Akshay to overhaul his two-and-a-half-year-old network for amateur musicians Lost Beat.

Together they built the app within two months.

Ankur, also an active angel investor, pointed out how monetization was a chronic pain for all music apps. He picked out a music-sharing feature within Lost Beat and asked Akshay to build a full-fledged prototype of it. “That was an interesting 30 minutes,” Akshay tells me, chuckling.

“The half an hour I spent talking to him was probably the most productive meeting I had ever had till then. The kind of work life I wanted to lead was clearer to me than it had ever been before, and I told Ankur I would be back in his office in two months with something interesting.”

Akshay already had his brother Abhay, who was working with fintech startup Instamojo, in his corner. The brother had build Lost Beat together. Now, they roped in Akshay’s college mates Ayush Verma and Ashish Kumar. Together, they built a nifty peer-to-peer app called Reach within two months.

Akshay Pruthi, Abhay Pruthi, Ashish Kumar, and Ayush Verma – co-founders of Reach.

When Akshay came knocking again with the prototype, Ankur was pleased enough with it to get on board. He also introduced the “hungry lean team” to his friend, frequent co-investor, and namesake: Ankur Singla, CEO of Helpchat.

Then came Akshay’s next stroke of good fortune. He happened to be at co-working hub 91 Springboard where Japanese VC Takeshi Ebihara, founder of Rebright Partners, was talking to entrepreneurs. Akshay seized the chance. And before long, Rebright led a seed round of funding in Reach, along with the two Ankurs.

A bunch of other investors – Sol Primero, lead investors of Zostel; Durgesh Kaushik, former marketing manager with Facebook and chief marketing officer of Edureka; Pritesh Gupta, founder of Zipgo and former vice president of Ola and TinyOwl; Anunay Gupta, partner – analytics at Brillio, and Sudhir Anandarao, the Indian face of Bessemer Venture Partners – also took part in the round. Together, the investors pumped in around US$500,000 in two tranches.

All this happened a year ago, when Reach was still in beta. The startup came out of the shadows a couple of weeks back, revealing its backers as well as its product 1.0.

What caught the eye of investors

P2P file sharing comes to mobile