From Swiggy and Zomato to Ola and Delhivery — these startups have seen their co-founders exit for their next adventure

Rahul Jaimini, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Swiggy, announced his official exit from the food aggregator business in May last year. He took up a co-founder’s role in edtech startup Pesto, which upskills engineers. Jamini has been an investor in Pesto since May 2019.

Zomato was founded by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah in 2008. The duo scaled the food delivery business together for a decade (till 2018), before Chaddah decided to start his entrepreneurial journey once again. He went on to set Mindhouse, a startup in the fitness space.

Ankit Jain, co-founder of Ola Electric who was seen as the right-hand man of Ola cofounder Bhavish Aggarwal, stepped away from the company in August 2020. He was associated with the ride hailing company for about five years, in several roles, and was elevated to the position of co-founder of Ola Electric in April 2019. He is now a co-founder and chief executive of a Bengaluru-based startup, which is in stealth mode for now.

PayU India’s co-founder and managing director, Shailaz Nag, exited the fintech startup in September 2019 and went on to launch his latest venture in the same year. Nag now leads offline-to-online (O2O) commerce platform DotPe, with Gyanesh Sharma and Anurag Gupta. The early-stage startup has raised about $35 million to date from investors like PayU and Ruizheng Investments.

Sachin Bhatia, who founded MakeMyTrip with Deep Kalra in 2000, has been on the entrepreneur journey time and again. After exiting the online travel aggregation business in 2010, he founded online dating platform TrulyMadly in 2013. He then started social commerce startup BulBul in 2018 and has been deeply involved in its growth journey.

Last month, Grofers’ cofounder Saurabh Kumar announced his exit from the online grocery business. The Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay alumnus founded Grofers in 2013, along with Albinder Dhindsa. Kumar, while announcing his exit, also hinted towards the start of a new entrepreneurial journey.

Delhivery was founded by Sahil Barua, Kapil Bharati, Suraj Saharan, Bhavesh Manglani and Mohit Tandon in 2011. Over the years, the team has scaled the business exponentially and are looking to hit the public market soon. However, Manglani and Tandon decided to step away from the company, reportedly, to meet regulatory requirements before starting their initial public offering (IPO) process.

InMobi was the first Indian unicorn, founded by Naveen Tewari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal. However, Gupta decided to exit the company in 2017 and founded his mobility business Yulu. Saxena exited the company around the same time and founded a luxury vacation marketplace Rizort in 2018.

Deepak Dhar, one of the cofounders of NestAway, stepped away from the Bengaluru-based home rental startup in 2019. He launched a blockchain-based data and identity management platform Repute the same year. The startup has raised about $1.7 million in seed funding to date from 3one4 Capital, GFC Global and Saison Capital.