Paytm-Acquired Shifu Founder’s New Venture

Deepansh Jain, a serial entrepreneur, who recently sold his startup Shifu to Paytm/Alibaba for 8 million dollars is giving back to the startup community with his recent takeover of US based company Appstitude.

Appstitude is a startup accelerator with a collection of startups across the globe. The entire portfolio has a footprint of 40 million users. Appstitude also provides development, marketing, and branding support to startups. In a nutshell, it’s an accelerator that will guide budding startups from building a prototype up to its beta release.

Deepansh started his journey at the age of 19, and so far has had two successful exits. Since then, he has invested in multiple startups. The recently sell was his startup Shifu, a virtual personal assistant, for 8 million dollars to Paytm in January 2016.

Based on his theory of investing in people rather ideas, Deepansh hopes he will bring all like-minded people across globe onto one platform. He refers to this platform as the “Union of People”, which will eventually support resources to create products or future.

He also added, “I want to make founders and startups geographically independent. Such freedom from control will lead to more successful global products”.

About the acquisition of Apstitude he said, “What Chris Kelsey [18 year old founder of Apstitude] has done in a few years is unparalleled to almost anything I've ever seen someone do in my time being an entrepreneur.
I’m excited to be a representative for such an accelerator. Besides the fact that it is a profitable company, the part that excites me the most is working with up and coming startups through our accelerator program.”

The acquisition amount is currently undisclosed, but it is estimated that their valuation was at least 2x-3x more than their annual revenue of 10 million dollars at the time of acquisition.

Deepansh is also an investor in the fields of fashion, travel, technology, PR and a blockchain based/ bitcoin related startup named D-Chain.