Former Angel One and Myntra exec Prateek Mehta joins South Park Commons as partner

Started by husband-wife duo of Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, SPC entered India in partnership with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal

Prateek Mehta, a former senior executive of online stockbroking firm Angel One, has joined South Park Commons (SPC), a tech startup community and an early-stage venture fund named after San Francisco’s South Park community, as its founding partner in India.

Mehta is a veteran leader in India's tech startup ecosystem, with previous avatars a co-founder of fintech platform Scripbox and a senior-vice president at e-commerce platform Myntra.

"As a founder, one does want to build the best company that s/he can. And to do that, the founder(s) have to get to high quality answers to - 'Why this?', 'Why now?' and 'Why me?'," Mehta said in a LinkedIn post on September 24.

"I felt that there is a gaping hole in the ecosystem that provides for an intellectually safe and emotionally secure space for founders to do this. It was exactly here that I feel that the tug of the South Park Commons model is the strongest," he added.

Started by husband-wife duo of Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, SPC entered India in partnership with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal.

Its entry comes at a time when venture funds are sitting on at least $12 billion in capital waiting to be deployed in India, the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem.

With over 820 million internet users and more than 100 tech unicorns, India has solidified its position as a global tech powerhouse, which explains SPC’s interest in India.

SPC will provide a supportive environment for India's most talented founders, technologists, and researchers to navigate the -1 to 0 stage of their careers, the stage when their primary task is figuring out what to work on next. It is similar to startup incubators, which help nurture and scale businesses.

South Park Commons started as an ad-hoc community and did not have a fund during its initial days. Agarwal and Sanghvi wrote angel cheques before setting up a dedicated capital pool, a venture fund. It launched its first fund in 2018 and another one in 2020.

Founded in 2015 by Sanghvi, the first female engineer at Facebook and former vice president of operations at Dropbox, and Agarwal, former chief technical officer of Dropbox, SPC has become a destination for technical founders seeking support in the earliest stages of their startup journey.

Apart from India, SPC also has seen a lot of interest from founders based in the United Kingdom.