General Catalyst’s Anand Chandrasekaran Steps Down As Partner, To Focus On His AI Startup

General Catalyst’s Anand Chandrasekaran has stepped down as partner after his three-year stint with the VC firm.

Chandrasekaran will now serve as a venture advisor to the US-based investor as he aims to spend more time building his own artificial intelligence startup, Crescendo, Moneycontrol reported.

While Chandrasekaran was sourcing, leading and managing investments in startups as a partner at the VC firm, his role for the US-based early stage investment firm will now be restricted to providing strategic counselling to it or its portfolio companies on a part-time or project basis. 

In his role as a partner for the VC, he invested in  Loop Health, Eeki Foods, Orange Health, FarMart, Magma, ZET, JEH Aerospace, GetSupp, STAN and QuriousBit, among others, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He founded Crescendo back in November 2023 in San Francisco, USA. The startup, which has been backed by General Catalyst’s creation fund and Alorica, provides vertically integrated, AI-powered customer service centres for businesses.

The startup aims to build an AI-layer in customer service stations that can deliver automated resolution paths for repetitive contact centre use cases as well as insights into how operations and customer satisfaction can be improved.

Chandrasekaran founded the startup with Alorica’s executive chairman Andy Lee (who serves as the  executive chairman for the startup as well), Zendesk’s Matt Price (who serves as Crescendo’s founder and CEO) and ex-Genesys Slava Zhakov (Crescendo’s CTO). The former GC partner serves as the president for the new startup.

“We believe that vertically integrating the pieces and creating a feedback loop could result in industry leading automation of several scaled use cases.  Using this IP, we believe we can drive material margin improvements in how contact centres are operated. This project brings together GC’s work in Creation and AI with our growing work in the US-India corridor,” General Catalyst said in a blogpost announcing the launch of the startup back in January 2024. 

Chandrasekaran has been active in the Indian startup ecosystem for about a decade now. As an angel investor, he has backed startups like Oyo, Rupeek, Exotel, Scaler, Observe.AI, among others over the years. Prior to joining General Catalyst in 2021, he was the director of Facebook’s messenger platform between 2016-19 and the executive vice president of products at US-based software solution provider Five9 between 2019-22. 

He has also had stints at Yahoo and Snapdeal, along with establishing mobility solutions startup Aeroprise during his two decades old career. 

This comes at a time when more Indian startups are looking to increase their use of generative AI capabilities to automate business functions. 

According to IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2023, at least 59% of enterprise-scale organisations in India actively use GenAI to fuel their business growth. Moreover, 74% of enterprises that are already working with this emerging tech have accelerated their investments in the past 24 months in areas like R&D and workforce reskilling. 

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