Peak XV-Backed Toplyne Shuts Operations

SUMMARY

Toplyne cofounder and CEO Rishen Kapoor said it has decided to shut operations due to its inability to scale and find product-market fit

The SaaS startup, which counts Peak XV Partners and Tiger Global among its investors, also plans to return capital to investors

Founded in 2021, Toplyne offers an AI-powered platform to help product-led companies convert their free users into paid ones

SaaS startup Toplyne is shutting operations due to its inability to scale and find product-market fit. The startup has decided to return the capital to its investors, cofounder and CEO Rishen Kapoor shared in a LinkedIn post, without elaborating on the quantum of the capital which would be returned.

“After 3.5 years of building Toplyne, we’ve made the tough decision to wind down operations and return capital to our investors. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t reach the scale or product-market fit we aimed for,” Kapoor said.

The cofounder said that the startup’s team would be supported in finding new roles.

Founded in 2021 by Kapoor, Ruchin Kulkarni, and Rohit Khanna, Toplyne offers an AI-powered platform to help product-led companies convert their free users into paid ones. It claims that its AI learns from customer data to generate audiences that can be converted with ads, in-app nudges, email, sales, and more.

Toplyne counts the likes of Canva, Grafana, InVideo, BrowserStack and Gather.Town among its customers.

The startup has a headcount of 30 and claims to have managed over 25 Mn user data.

In 2022, the startup raised $15 Mn funding from marquee investors like Peak XV and Tiger Global. The round also saw participation from existing investors such as Together Fund, Sequoia India’s Surge and angel investors from Canva, Vercel and Zoominfo.

Before that, it secured $2.5 Mn in a seed funding round from Together Fund and Sequoia Capital’s Surge and angel investors from Freshworks, Zoominfo and Canva.

The development comes at a time when a number of startups have shut over the last couple of years amid the funding winter. As many as 15 startups wound down operations last year. The trend has continued this year as well.

Just last month, banana cultivation-focussed agritech startup Greenikk and generative AI startup InsurStaq.ai decided to shut their operations.

Social learning platform Bluelearn, digital health platform Nintee, fintech startup GoldPe, and neo-banking startup Muvin are among the other startups which shut operations this year.