FrontRow Cofounder Ishan Preet Singh Rejoins Lightspeed India As Investor

Beleaguered edtech startup FrontRow’s cofounder Ishaan Preet Singh has rejoined venture capital (VC) firm Lightspeed India as an investor. 

Singh made the announcement in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday (May 8). In his role at the investment firm, he will invest in early stage startups across sectors such as consumer internet and artificial intelligence (AI).

“I’m going to spend the next decade investing in early stage startups in India. I’m excited to be back at Lightspeed India investing across consumer and AI, working with an amazing team to help even more amazing founders,” Singh said. 

Speaking about his rationale for turning into an investor, the FrontRow cofounder said that “helping friends build companies” during his sabbatical (after shutting down the edtech startup) helped him realise that he “genuinely missed investing”.

He added, “I’d always loved being an investor, but hadn’t felt particularly useful working with portfolio companies. This was one of the main reasons I hadn’t stayed on in VC. In retrospect, this was because a) I had no idea what I was doing, and b) just couldn’t empathise with founders. But FrontRow changed both of these”.

It is pertinent to note that before founding the edtech startup, Singh used to work with Lightspeed India as an investor. 

An alumnus of IIT-Delhi, Singh founded FrontRow in 2019 but shut down the extracurricular activity startup last year, citing subdued user traction, ballooning marketing costs and plateauing revenue. 

The edtech startup raised $17 Mn over its lifetime but, as per Singh, never ‘got to retention metrics that showed real PMF’ (product-market fit). After six months, he has returned to the fold of investing and joined Lightspeed India. 

Speaking about what inspired him to take up the role of an investor, he said that a meeting with a friend for a Series A funding round made him consider returning back to the investor fold. He added that such instances happened multiple times over the past year, which led him to take the plunge as an investor. 

Citing the example of the hefty growth made by the Indian startup ecosystem in the past decade, he said that the homegrown ecosystem was bursting with ideas and capital, adding that the next decade is going to be “equally dramatic”.

“In 2013, Flipkart had just become India’s first unicorn, Zomato had raised <$50 Mn and did not do food delivery while Freshworks had just raised a $7 Mn Series C. UPI and Jio did not exist. 10 years is a short time to go from there to over $40B in market cap of public tech companies, multiple billion dollar revenue startups and an ecosystem bursting with ideas and capital. The next 10 years are going to be equally dramatic,” Ishan Preet Singh said answering the question about . 

On why he chose consumer tech companies and AI as his area of expertise, Singh said that consumer tech companies would be the largest companies in the country in the future.

On the AI front, he said that the emerging technology will transform the “hundreds of billions of dollars of services that India provides the world”. 

“India’s IT services and BPO market have been mainstays of our growth but they will look dramatically different. I’ve spent the last few months working on AI, and not only is all the hype real, I’d say it’s not hyped enough. AI demos are viral today, but AI services will be an integral part of our lives 10 years later,” Singh added.

Singh’s appointment comes at a time when the Indian VC landscape is witnessing a major churn at the top level. His appointment also comes two months after Abhishek Nag stepped down as a partner at Lightspeed India.

Earlier this year, Nexus Venture Partners’ Sameer Brij Verma resigned to launch his new fund, while partner at venture debt firm Trifecta Capital, Sandeep Bapat, also quit to join PE firm Singularity Growth. 

This is notwithstanding the spate of top-level exits at other Indian VC and PE firms in the past one year.

Singh has joined Lightspeed India at a time when the VC firm’s larger bets have not played out well, including investments in big-ticket names such as B2B ecommerce giant Udaan and social media platform ShareChat. Both startups are facing valuation markdowns.