After Shutdown, Toplyne Cofounder Rishen Kapoor Returns To Peak XV

Months after the shutdown of SaaS startup Toplyne, its cofounder and chief executive officer Rishen Kapoor has joined back the investment team of VC major Peak XV Partners.

Kapoor took to LinkedIn to make the announcement. “Building Toplyne was rewarding but challenging. We worked with amazing customers and teammates, but ultimately decided to wind down the business. Peak XV has always felt like home. I’m excited to be back, working with founders building the future,” he said.

Before founding Toplyne, Kapoor worked with Peak XV Partners’ (Sequoia Capita India & SEA then) Surge, a seed stage platform for early stage startups.

Founded by Kapoor, Ruchin Kulkarni, and Rohit Khanna in 2021, Toplyne offered an AI-powered platform to help product-led companies convert their free users into paid ones. It claimed that its AI learns from customer data to generate audiences that can be converted with ads, in-app nudges, email, sales, and more. The startup counted Canva, Grafana, InVideo, BrowserStack, and Gather.Town among its key customers.

Toplyne shut operations in October 2024 citing its inability to scale and find product-market fit.

Before Peak XV, Kapoor worked with notable companies like customer engagement platform CleverTap as the lead product manager.

This marks another instance of a startup founder dawning the investor hat in the Indian startup ecosystem. Last year in August, hyperlocal delivery startup Magicpin’s cofounder Brij Bhushan joined VC firm Prime Venture Partners as a full time partner. Prior to that, ex-SuprDaily founder Puneet Kumar joined Nexus Venture Partners as a partner in May. 

Meanwhile, Kapoor’s entry in Peak XV comes after two top deck exits at the firm last year. In November, Anandamoy Roychowdhary, who was a partner in the Surge team, quit the VC firm. Prior to that, Peak XV also saw its managing director Piyush Gupta exit to float his own secondaries focussed VC firm Kenro Capital.