Ravi Yadalam

The first product I ever sold online, was a cell phone. I was really amazed, for three reasons: First, the buyer was all the way in Germany. Second, I was 18 years old, and I had never received a cheque in the mail before. Third, I didn't really even have a cell phone to sell. I simply bought one with the money I received from the buyer and shipped it to him, all the while maintaining a modest margin. This showed me very early on how the Internet breaks all barriers of geography and the opportunity for innovation. In my experiments with e-commerce, I quickly realized the effectiveness of an established Brand. With performance marketing, selling a top online retailer's products removed the quality-related reservations of the customer. However, it brought along with it another hurdle - customer loyalty. Enter Pennyful, a company that actually pays you to shop online. Pennyful was the highest-rated cashback platform in India for customer satisfaction. Pennyful expanded to India later that year in November 2011, and eventually became India's pioneer and highest rated cashback shopping product. Across India and the US, Pennyful had 3000+ e-commerce partner stores, 350,000+ registered members and 40mn products listed. Extending the cashback benefit to the consumer's out of pocket medical expenses, I co-founded MediRupee in 2013. With a free MediRupee membership, one would receive up to 30% cashback on all their medical expenses that no healthcare in India covered including medicines, dental, diagnostic, cosmetic surgery, fertility and sleep. MediRupee partnered with 200+ top healthcare providers across 7,000 locations in 6 cities. After a successful exit with Pennyful, I founded Aryeh Ventures, to build impactful products and businesses partnering with exceptional technical experts. The first company that I co-founded here was Lightwing, an intelligent cloudops automation product that helps companies cut their public cloud costs by up to 90% on AWS, Azure and DigitalOcean. Lightwing is used by companies of all sizes from large enterprises like Wipro to mid-market firms and startups. Lightwing is backed by Techstars and has been part of NetApp Accelerator Cohort 5 and FounderStack by Accel Partners.