So I looked through all my contacts, particularly the engineers and consulting shops that I had worked with in the past. I remembered my old company Quintype, there were several components that were not built in-house, and I recalled a 3rd-party API that was providing the functionality for the AI-powered personalization algorithms, among other things. The product was called WRU.ai, and was made by a company named Coffeebeans.io [CB].
When I first spoke to Naveen Kunapareddy, a cofounder of CB and the brains behind WRU, it was not to acquire this AI, nor was it to suggest he cofound a new social commerce engine that would eventually be called Shoptype. But that is what ended up happening. The very first platform to emerge from the AwakeVC studio was Shoptype.
Shoptype was designed to implement the Awake Market Protocol, a global interconnected market network to stitch together all the fragmented platforms on the Internet, to create a truly open and social global economy. But to deliver this vision, I knew I would need talent like no other. When Naveen and the other founders of CB agreed to start this new venture, we also decided to acquire WRU and the team behind it.
Kasim Tuman who was a principal engineer when I was at Runa and had since gone on to build amazing things across several top platform companies in the valley agreed to become CTO.
Fairly early on in the game, we also acquihired the team and technology behind Edulyx, bringing on Abhishek Rajpoot and Kratika Shrivastava (who eventually married each other to become the first Awake couple). A few people from Quintype also left to join us, in particular, my old college classmate and colleague across multiple companies Kuruvilla Choolackal. Our team was shaping up quickly across product management, platform engineering, and client solutions.
PS - Read the whole book at Beyond All Clouds.
Wineful, Napa Valleypro
Commented 28 Aug, 2022
Great story...great Team!
I did not that was the evaluation...pretty COOL!