Algo Legal has hired former law firm and in-house lawyer Ankit Guha, who had set up and sold an educational tech start-up to a US company within only nine months of starting it up.
Guha is joining
Guha is a 2009 NUJS Kolkata graduate who had worked at Argus Partners in Kolkata, J Sagar Associates (JSA) and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas in Mumbai before joining VC fund WestBridge Capital Partners in Bangalore as vice president in 2017.
In 2019, however, he took the step of founding Fyraway – which is billed on his Linked-in page as “a unique game-based learning environment where children learn how to code”, by way of “bite-sized online games and assignments with the goal of teaching programming to kids”.
“I was responsible for product development and overall strategy and having scaled the company to 9000+ MAUS [monthly active users] by February 2020, had the good fortune to exit the business in March 2020, when a US edtech company acquired our primary products,” his Linked-in profile states.
He told us today that the business had been entirely bootstrapped and had grown to 8 full-time employees, though it would have eventually had to raise external capital.
“The truth is that 99 out of a 100 startups fail and I am aware of it,” he recounted. “So when we had the offer, we decided to take it. Of course, what could have been if we continued down that path will remain an unknown. I wrestled with it quite a bit, but made up my mind to sell in the end.”
While he was bound by confidentiality provisions regarding the purchaser and the price, he said that “customer acquisition costs were high” and since it was “still a very nascent space in India” “you need to burn a lot just to educate customers”.
We had recently reported that former Algo partner Archand Chakraborty and principal associate Vijay Santosh had joined PwC.