Dunzo co-founder Mukund Jha in talks to raise Rs 80 cr for his Gen AI startup

Jha had even engaged with Y Combinator, but it is unclear if the talks between two will go ahead, one of the persons cited above told Moneycontrol.

Mukund Jha, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Dunzo, is in talks to raise around Rs 50-80 crore (around $6-10 million) from Together Fund for his new startup, people aware of the developments told Moneycontrol.

The fundraise comes months after Moneycontrol reported that Jha was leaving cash-strapped hyperlocal company Dunzo back in October 2023.

The round comes at a time when several top executives from startups across the board have been leaving to start up ventures on their own, a shift that is attractive to operators and investors alike. Experienced leaders are much better off having a considerable stake in their own company, rather than being a small stakeholder in a larger startup which has peaked, Moneycontrol reported earlier.

“Jha is building a generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) company and also wants to automate a lot of the quality assurance (QA) that companies do – think of it like an overlap of AI and SaaS,” one of the people cited above said.

QA checks are done when businesses create and run tests, recognise errors and provide feedback to ensure that a final product is satisfactory and meets a company's quality requirements.

Jha had even engaged with Y Combinator, but it is unclear if the talks between two will go ahead, one of the persons cited above told Moneycontrol.

Mukund Jha and Together Fund did not respond to Moneycontrol’s queries.

Jha, who was with Dunzo from 2015 until 2023, has previously worked with Google in New York, where he tried starting up two of his own companies. Jha co-founded Wisdom.ly, a group video platform for virtual meetups and conferences, and Habet, an intelligent goal tracking platform.

He is raising money at a time when Dunzo is trying to stitch together a round to keep operations afloat even as its business dwindles.

Together Fund was founded in 2021 by Freshworks’ Girish Mathrubootham, Manav Garg, founder and CEO of Eka Software and Shubham Gupta, previously at Matrix Partners India. It had raised $85 million in its first fund and then upsized the total corpus to $150 million in its second fund, announced in 2023.

Together Fund has invested in over 20 companies across horizontal SaaS application areas like recruitment, sales intelligence, and marketing and vertical Saas companies in healthcare as well as those creating categories like cloud for connected devices.

Some of its portfolio firms include DhiWise, SpendFlo, SecureDen and TopLyne.