Deepika Padukone, Raftaar Backed Startup FrontRow Winds Up Operations

New Delhi: Non-academic learning and community platform FrontRow, backed by celebrities like Deepika Padukone and rapper Raftaar, has shut down, media reports said on Monday.

Ishaan Preet Singh, Co-founder of FrontRow, confirmed to TechCrunch that the startup is winding up and is “exploring IP acquisition talks and possibility to return the unused capital to investors”.

The startup had raised nearly $18 million, backed by Elevation Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Not Boring Capital, among others.

In August 2021, Raftaar invested an undisclosed amount in the FrontRow app, after the app had secured seed funding of $3.2 million from Padukone, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF Partners).

The non-academic skill development platform was founded by serial entrepreneurs Mikhil Raj, Shubhadit Sharma and Singh in 2020. The app had forged creative alliances with celebrities like Neha Kakkar, DIVINE, Suresh Raina, Amit Trivedi, Biswa Kalyan Rath, Yuzvendra Chahal, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Raju Srivastava, Sunburn, MortaL and 8bit Thug.

The startup laid off 75 per cent of its workforce, about 130 employees, in October last year.

In May 2022, FrontRow had sacked 30 per cent of its workforce, owing to fund crunch and the market downturn.

Co-founder Singh had called the layoffs a “difficult prioritisation decision taken to achieve the goal over the next decades".

"We have over 24 months of runway to keep iterating and improving on our core business, we had to take a few difficult prioritisation decisions over the past few weeks," he had said.

FrontRow provided courses like singing, music composition, cricket, photography, and film-making from influencers in these fields.