Untold Seed Stories: First 500 Days of Mensa

The D2C ecosystem has truly found its feet in India. There are now a lot of great brands making niche, high quality products for targeted audiences. The e-commerce wave has given them a channel of distribution that they own. But as the market matures, there are other needs for young D2C startups. They need marketing, sales, and brand talent, things which they can’t easily get access to in order to grow as fast as they want to.

6:55 - 8:16 - The India opportunity for a digital house of brands.
8:34 - 9:58 - How did Mensa achieve Unicorn status in 6 months?
16:35 - 18:55 - How did Mensa use technology top scale? 
19:37 - 21:37 -  How did Mensa convince founders to sell their brands to Mensa?
27:05 - 29:25  - Advice for founders from Ananth & Subrata.

Ananth Narayanan’s Mensa aims to solve this problem for the new D2C economy. Mensa is a house of brands which invests in digital-first, D2C brands, and scales them globally. Previously, Ananth was CEO of Myntra, which was acquired by Flipkart, and co-founder and CEO of Medlife, which was acquired by Pharmeasy.

Subrata Mitra, my colleague and partner at Accel, joins me to speak to Ananth about his approach to identifying brands with growth potential, his learnings from Myntra and Medlife, and achieving unicorn status in Mensa’s first six months. 

Remember, Mensa is not even 500 days old!

Subrata’s presence is also notable here, as he has had a long relationship with Ananth. Fun fact: Mensa was co-created as a concept by Ananth and Accel working together from the start. We’ll go into more details in the podcast, but Subrata has been in the trenches with Ananth: from ideation to team expansion, and from strategy to building out their tech platform.

I thank Ananth and Subrata for coming on and sharing all of these stories and insights about Mensa’s first 500 days. We wish Ananth and the Mensa team all the best, we are definitely rooting for them!