How P2P file sharing app Reach came to be

The start-up came out of the shadows a couple of weeks back, reports Tech in Asia

Chance encounters can turn your life around and for Akshay Pruthi, a 22-year-old engineering student who had a cool hack to discover music with friends, it has been a good turn.

Akshay’s first brush with Ankur Warikoo, co-founder of Nearbuy (formerly Groupon India), changed the course of his life and his start-up. Ankur managed to convince Akshay to overhaul his two-and-a-half-year-old network for amateur musicians, ‘Lost Beat’.

This was the first step towards the birth of a nifty peer-to-peer app called Reach.

Since then, Akshay’s luck with chance encounters only improved. Ankur introduced him and his prototype of Reach to his friend and frequent co-investor Ankur Singla, CEO of Helpchat.

Reach lets you peek into your friends’ phone, once you are granted access. Users can choose the files they want to share, letting anyone with access, not only view, but also use and directly transfer them if needed.

Akshay’s next stroke of good fortune came when he happened to be at co-working hub 91 Springboard, where Japanese VC Takeshi Ebihara, founder of Rebright Partners, was talking to entrepreneurs. Here onward, Rebright led a seed round of funding in Reach, along with the two Ankurs.

Sol Primero, lead investors of Zostel; Durgesh Kaushik, former marketing manager with Facebook and chief marketing officer of Edureka; Pritesh Gupta, founder of Zipgo and former vice president of Ola and TinyOwl; Anunay Gupta, partner – analytics at Brillio and Sudhir Anandarao, the Indian face of Bessemer Venture Partners also took part in the round. Together, the investors pumped in around $500,000 in two tranches.

All this happened a year ago, when Reach was still in beta. The start-up came out of the shadows a couple of weeks back, revealing its backers as well as its product 1.0.

 

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.