Kunal Shah to join Sequoia India as advisor, will continue in existing roles

Kunal Shah, Chairman of Freecharge, took to Facebook and Twitter on Friday to announce that he would be taking on advisorial role at Sequoia Capital India. This will be an additional role to his current commitments as Chairman of Freecharge and also Chairman of the Executive Council (2015-2017) at Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). Sequoia Capital India hasn't issued a press statement yet, but confirmed the news with a retweet.

In May 2016, Govind Rajan took over the reigns of the CEO post at Freecharge, while Kunal moved onto his new role as Chairman. In an earlier conversation with YourStory, Kunal had noted,

The nine months prior to the launch of FreeCharge and immediately thereafter were not easy. Some retailers dismissed the idea as stupid. Some thought it was too good to be true. A few even thought the idea was too innovative for the Indian market.

After raising a round of seed funding from the Tandon Group and Sequoia Capital in 2010, FreeCharge went on to secure Series-A funding of Rs 200 million from Sequoia Capital a year later. In 2014, FreeCharge received $33 million Series-B Funding from Sequoia Capital, Sofina, and Ru-Net, and raised another $80 million from Hong Kong-based fund Tybourne Capital Management and SF-based fund Valiant Capital Management, and existing investors. In April 2015, Snapdeal announced that it had acquired Freecharge for an estimated $400 million.

Kunal is also an active angel investor and startup mentor. According to Crunchbase, he has made about 20 investments in startups participating in seed stage as well as Series-A and Series-B rounds. Some of his portfolio companies include Voonik, Flyrobe, ShaadiSaga and Unacademy. Kunal is also quite active on social media and regularly shares best startup practices and interacts with startup founders on Twitter and Facebook. His Delta 4 thesis, that every time a new system improves an existing system by a delta of greater than 4, it becomes difficult to go back to the previous inefficient system and becomes 'stickier'. This was also one of the most popular sessions at YourStory's TechSparks 2016.

In-depth read about Delta 4 from TechSparks 2016.: What inefficiency are you trying to solve with your startup? Kunal Shah, Founder, FreeCharge