Exclusive: After ShareChat Exit, Cofounders Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Pratap Singh Launch Robotics Startup 

After quitting as cofounders from ShareChat in January this year, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan have registered a new startup and are looking to make inroads into the robotics sector.

Singh and Ahsan incorporated General Autonomy Private Limited on May 10, 2023 as per Ministry Of Corporate Affairs (MCA) records. The company is registered in Bengaluru with a paid-up capital of INR 1 Lakh.

While General Autonomy’s specific business model is not clear, the company has stated that it will be in the business of “Transport and Storage” in its application to the MCA.

On his LinkedIn profile, Ahsan claims he is ‘Currently driving screws, bolts, nuts and piles,” and his current role is listed as ‘Cofounder of Stealth Startup’. Besides this, Ahsan’s X bio says ‘Robotics enthusiast’.

Interestingly, Ahsan, a material science engineering graduate from IIT Kanpur in 2014, has been working on autonomous navigation since 2012 as per his LinkedIn profile. Further, Singh was part of the robotics club at IIT Kanpur, and graduated the same year as Ahsan. Both went on to cofound ShareChat a year after their graduation from the IIT.

The term ‘general autonomy’ is a concept in robotics that deals with the automation of equipment across use cases but is particularly relevant in the case of industrial equipment.  Given the new company’s name and the business description, it would seem that Ahsan and Singh’s new business is related to automating transport and storage equipment.

Neither cofounder who quit ShareChat responded to Inc42’s calls or questions sent on email about General Autonomy Private Limited.

Globally, there are a number of companies that deal with general autonomy and often offer this technology as a service to startups, warehouses and other parts of the logistics ecosystem.

One example is San Francisco-based Polymath Robotics, which is backed by Y Combinator, Samsara Ventures and others. The startup’s tech enables businesses to add autonomous navigation to any large industrial vehicle.

Founders Starting Afresh In 2023

Singh and Ahsan’s new venture represents the latest example of second-time entrepreneurs looking at new opportunities in 2023 after quitting their previous venture. Founder-level churn and attrition have become commonplace in the past 20 months.

This year alone, the likes of Teachmint cofounder and former CTO Anshuman Kumar and GoMechanic’s Rishabh Karwa look to begin new innings due to headwinds in their previous ventures.

Of course, entrepreneurs moving on from one startup to another is not a new trend by any measure. The past few years have seen examples such as Kunal Shah (Freecharge to CRED) and Jitendra Gupta (Citrus Pay to Jupiter), Anant Goel (Milkbasket to Sorted) and Ankit Bhati (Ola to Amnic) and each of these founders raised funding quite quickly for their new ventures.

As we wrote a few weeks ago, being a seasoned founder is a major advantage when it comes to engaging with investors. The track record of second-time entrepreneurs is helpful for investors in making early bets. In many cases, these startups raise outlier rounds in the seed stages due to the founder’s past work and startup.

It’s also worth noting that the 2022-23 funding winter has also accelerated plans for many founders who were caught on the wrong side of the macroeconomic slowdown. As consumer internet business models struggled to find growth traction, many founders decided to pursue new opportunities.

There’s also a growing realisation that new and emerging technologies in 2023 such as generative AI or robotics are more relevant today from a product-market fit perspective than say a social media platform such as ShareChat.

At the moment, there’s little clarity on the stage of product development or indeed what kind of product or service the new company is working on, but it’s only been five months since the incorporation and we expect more details to emerge soon.

Before quitting ShareChat, Singh was cofounder and CTO, while Ahsan was the COO along with cofounder. The third ShareChat founder Ankush Sachdeva continues to be the CEO at the social media unicorn.

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