Life’s not all fund, games for this Class XII student

PANAJI: As the calendar prepares to head towards summer, most Class XII students fret and spend a large part of their day puzzling over competitive exam books. They also frantically try to shave off seconds spent on quantitative aptitude tests while simultaneously wishing they had more time to study for the various entrance exams.
A cursory glance at Caranzalem resident Siddharth Shetty gives you the same impression.Except that Shetty is pondering over appraisals and simultaneously making complex calculations to try and figure out his funding needs.
The 18-year-old is founder and chief executive officer of Fundlined.com, a crowdfunding software that allows any individual or organization to raise funds from across the globe. So while his peers struggle to get a competitive percentile and get into a good college, Shetty is happy to put his board exams on the back burner and learn on the job. His parents are not.
“My parents are not very happy about my decision and sometimes it gets very tense at home, so I try not to say much,” Shetty says.
While getting parental approval is a vital part of any child’s growth, Shetty needs it more than ever given that his start-up is still in its infancy; Fundlined’s first angel investor was Shetty’s father, or rather, his father’s credit card.
Following Shetty’s decision to delay answering his Class XII board exams, Shetty’s father decided to close the funding tap, which is why the tall lanky lad has begun to look for investors. But not just any investor will do.
“Right now, it is not just the funding aspect. For Fundlined to grow we need someone with experience, someone who can mentor the team,” Shetty adds.
Fundlined began as a crowdfunding platform on the lines of Kickstarter, Gofundme, Indiegogo and Wishberry. But Shetty soon realized that his platform had nothing unique to offer. Quoting from Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One, Shetty says, “Copying others takes the world from 1 to n, which is not great because you are just adding to what was already there. But every time we create something new, we take the world from 0 to 1.”
With this thought in mind, Shetty took his company through a pivot. In business parlance, a pivot is a strategic shift away from one business model to another one, a shift in focus usually made by start-ups to find the right customer, value proposition, and positioning.
Moving away from the one platform for every campaign model, Fundlined has ventured into SaaS (Software as a Service) wherein the company designs and builds custom dedicated crowdfunding platforms for non-profits, universities, and corporates. It is allegedly the only company in the world that does this for now.
In less than two months since the pivot, six leading universities, including two Indian universities and a Fortune 500 company are using Fundlined’s software to raise funds for a range of projects.
As the Founder of Fundlined, Shetty has a team of specialists working under him, a team culled out from some of India’s best management and technology institutions. Today, he has a team of 10 and is aggressively looking to expand the team to keep up with the company’s international focus.
“We are hiring aggressively across all domains and in the coming days, we would be having people from countries like USA, UK, Japan, and Singapore joining our team,” Shetty says.