Ex-Swiggy, Zomato Execs Launch Profound With $1.5M for AI Intros

BENGALURU: Former Swiggy and Zomato executives Anuj Rathi and Prashant Parashar launch Profound, an AI startup, with $1.5 million in seed funding.

The announcement carries a founder-heavy investor list that says plenty about the pair’s standing. Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety invests personally. So do Swiggy co-founder Nandan Reddy, Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur, and Kunal Shah, per YourStory. Institutional money comes from Stellaris Venture Partners and 3one4 Capital.

When the chief executives of India’s fiercest food-delivery rivals back the same seed round, the bet is on people, not decks.

Profound builds what it describes as a matching and introductions engine. The Bengaluru startup applies AI to the problem of connecting the right people, a category that spans professional networking, hiring, and community. The founders know distribution-heavy consumer products cold: Rathi and Parashar ran product and technology through Swiggy’s hypergrowth years.

The fresh capital goes toward engineering and product hires, stronger AI capability, and faster development of the core matching engine.

The round is small, and that is partly the point. Indian consumer AI seeds are increasingly operator-led rounds where the syndicate is the story. Founder-to-founder capital moved early into Profound the way it once did into CRED and Jupiter.

It also extends a running theme. Indian AI startups raised $676 million in the first half, four times last year, with unicorns Sarvam and Emergent leading. The next layer down, seed rounds like this one, is where the 2028 headlines are being planted.

Whether AI can make introductions feel less like spam remains the open product question. The people funding the attempt have distribution scars to guide it.