Aravind Srinivas-Backed AI Startup Astra Shuts Operations

About four months after raising capital from Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas, AI-focussed SaaS startup Astra has shut shop. 

The startup’s cofounder and CEO Supreet Hegde announced the development in a post on LinkedIn, hinting at disagreements with cofounder Ranjan Rajagopalan. 

“Despite our best efforts, as co-founders, we found ourselves at different crossroads regarding the pace of growth. It is a challenging decision, but we have chosen to part ways and bring this chapter to a close,” Hegde said.

Besides, he hinted at lack of trust from enterprises and the rise in the number of AI agents leading to confusion among clients.

“Working with larger companies meant navigating lengthy sales cycles, especially as an early-stage startup asking clients to trust us with sensitive data from platforms like Salesforce, G-drive, Slack, and CLM. The current surge of interest and confusion surrounding AI agents added yet another layer of complexity, with many clients unsure of whom to trust or how to evaluate these AI agents,” the CEO added in the post. 

While what the IIT Madras graduate intends to do moving forward is yet to be discerned, the other cofounder Rajagopalan has already set up a new startup which is in stealth mode currently. 

Both the founders graduated from IIT Madras. Prior to setting up Astra, Hegde served as a VP of global business development for enterprise tech startup HyperVerge. Rajagopalan worked with AI text-to-video conversion platform Proshort and Google before cofounding the startup. 

Astra, founded in 2023, positioned itself as the “Chief of Staff for every account executive (AE)”. It offered an AI-powered sales analytics platform for businesses to implement effective salesforce mapping, standardise lead and sales conversation ratio and more. 

The startup claimed that its platform allowed AEs to close more deals in a quarter by automating 80% of their activities and enhancing their deal execution quality. Hegde, in his post, claimed that Astra’s unique offerings landed it two major clients without direct competitors. 

However, it is pertinent to note that Astra never scaled beyond the Beta mode.

Earlier in March this year, the CEO announced receiving backing from Srinivas. “Aravind is undoubtedly one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, and having him on our cap table reinforces our mission to build the world’s best AI Sales Agent,” Hegde said back then. 

The shutdown of the early stage startup adds to the growing list of new entities looking to crack previously uncharted spaces like AI, EVs, quick commerce and more. In the case of AI, Astra is the second early stage entity to shut shop in recent months. 

Earlier this month, AI SaaS startup subtl.ai shut operations due to a dearth of capital and investor interest. Like Astra, subtl.ai also focussed on building AI agents to automate customer-query redressals.