After Myntra and Medlife, here’s what Ananth Narayanan is up to

Good morning!

Ananth Narayanan is no stranger to building ecommerce brands. He was the CEO of Myntra and joined Medlife as Co-founder and CEO, which was later acquired by PharmEasy.

In May 2021, he launched his new venture Mensa Brands, which wants to work with homegrown D2C brands, which generate over 70 percent of their sales online, have an annual revenue range of Rs 10-70 crore, and are profit-generating.

"Mensa aims to partner with the best founders and brands, invest in a majority stake of these brands, and create an operating system for them to scale, which will be a combination of product, technology, and ecommerce expertise," he tells YourStory.

Last month, it raised approximately $50 million in a Series A round led by Accel Partners, Falcon Edge Capital, Norwest Venture Partners as well as prominent angel investors such as Kunal Shah, Mukesh Bansal, Rahul Mehta of  DST Global, and Scott Shleifer of Tiger Global.

The founding team at Mensa has a combined experience of over 60 years in Indian and global ecommerce, bringing in-house domain expertise in marketplace-native technology, data mining and digital marketing, category management and operations, brand building, and global expansion.

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News & Updates

• Pfizer is in the final stages of an agreement with India to supply anti-COVID-19 vaccines, CEO Dr Albert Bourla said. He said that significant local manufacturing of vaccines that is happening at the Serum Institute of India will provide the backbone of vaccinating the Indian people.

• The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has ordered an antitrust probe against Google for breaching anti-competitive laws in the smart TV market. Google currently owns over 75 percent of the smart TV market in India.

• The income tax department said its new utility developed to help TDS deductors and TCS collectors identify non-filers or "specified persons" on whom a higher rate of taxes will be levied will help ease the compliance burden.

• The All India Council of Association of MSMEs (AICA) said steep hike in prices of raw materials such as steel, pig iron, copper, aluminium alloy, etc, are adding to the woes of the sector. AICA consists of about 170 MSME Associations covering more than 2,00,000 MSME industries.

• FM Nirmala Sitharaman asked Infosys to fix all issues on the new Income Tax portal immediately, while the software major said at least five technical glitches, including viewing past ITRs and e-proceedings, are expected to be resolved within a week.

Before you go, stay inspired with… 

“We will help their brands grow and scale into a household name by leveraging our sourcing, design, technology, digital marketing and inventory management capabilities.”

— Ananth Narayanan, Founder and CEO, Mensa Brands

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