Stanford alumni unite to create “Reaction,” a global approach to venture capital
Innovations with the potential to solve global problems can be created anywhere
Silicon Valley has historically enabled innovation by providing local entrepreneurs with unique access to technology, talent, and capital. Global access to data, computing power and intelligence have leveled the playing field. This is allowing the greatest innovations of our generation, those with the potential to address our most pressing needs and measurably improve billions of lives, to not only come from Silicon Valley but also to be created anywhere in the world.
These innovations will fail to achieve their potential unless they can be promoted everywhere
To help these innovations realize their greatest potential, local entrepreneurs need capital and relationships to help them create businesses to bring their innovations to market, and to enable the entrepreneurs to promote their innovations globally to each of the markets they can benefit.
Reaction was founded by a global community of Stanford alumni to solve this problem
Reaction was created by over one hundred Stanford GSB alumni from forty-four countries. Dan Matthies, Co-Founder and Managing Partner said “Reaction’s unique advantage is its community of entrepreneurs, investors and executives, and the wider network that each member belongs to, which creates a global footprint, expertise in a wide range of sectors, and diverse representation. This gives us access to deal flow that is often proprietary and allows us to have a greater impact and influence in supporting the portfolio companies and bringing innovations to scale.”
Claudia Mitchell, Reaction’s Board Chair added, “The response from our community and network has been incredible to see – many have jumped in to support the fund as well as our portfolio companies, and we look forward to leveraging this and expanding our reach even further.”
Jumbotail, India’s leading New Retail platform for food and grocery
After making three investments in companies with a large presence in the US, and leveraging its network to help these companies scale globally, Reaction is now supporting Jumbotail, India’s leading New Retail platform for food and grocery, that is empowering local mom & pop “kirana” store owners by using technology, data science and design.
Jumbotail was co-founded by Karthik Venkateswaran, a former army officer and marketplace product veteran, and Ashish Jhina, a former management consultant with multi-generational farming roots. Karthik and Ashish met in the Stanford MBA class of 2011. Their deep understanding of the Indian landscape enabled them to approach its retail food problem from a uniquely local and customer-centric perspective.
Jumbotail Co-Founders Karthik and Ashish
Ashish Jhina, Jumbotail COO, explains “The food value chain in India is highly fragmented on both the supply and demand side. There is a lack of standardization in the supply chain. When we started in 2015, our competitors were looking to aggregate supply or betting on the demise of the mom & pop store - our reading of the market steered us to digitize the millions of ‘kirana’ stores that represent 95% of all food and grocery demand in India – this contra bet has paid off .”
“At the heart of it, Jumbotail has designed and developed an ecosystem that aggregates kirana stores on an online marketplace platform and connects them with the supply side – brands, producers, and traders. Additionally, we own and operate our full stack tech-driven supply chain and logistics to provide warehousing and fulfilment solutions to our sellers and storefront delivery to our customers. We are also helping kirana stores get more demand and fight off competition by offering them our J24 franchise of modern convenience grocery stores which provides entrepreneurs with our cutting edge GoldenEye retail operating system, AI driven merchandising, consumer loyalty, multiple online and omni-channel integrations and more.”
Karthik Venkateswaran, CEO of Jumbotail, explains what inspired him to start the company.
“After I graduated from Stanford I was working in Silicon Valley on marketplace innovation and realized that the world needed to progress on two fronts. The first was that more people needed to work on building the most advanced technologies without prejudice to where they could be applied.
The second, which actually has far more potential to positively ‘disrupt’ the broader world of 6 billion people outside of the 1.5 billion benefiting most from innovation today, is about taking these technologies and applying them to solve real world problems, and not just photo-sharing type problems - Making technology inclusive.
This allows entrepreneurs to take what one person built and use it to solve local problems in a way that can put more food onto more peoples plates by making that part of the world more efficient.”
Bill Ozturk, a Founding Partner of Reaction, commented “in Ashish and Karthik, we have two very responsible leaders who are customer centric and by nature of their backgrounds, truly understand the problem. They are very much aligned with our mission and values to drive innovation and create exponential change”.
The power of Reaction’s “feet on the ground” network
To diligence the Jumbotail Investment opportunity, Reaction turned to Radhika Narang, a local member of the Reaction community to talk to their customers, the “kirana” store owners and validate the business potential. Radhika’s take - “kirana stores are the lifeblood of India. Over a billion people rely on them for their food every day. Jumbotail is the only solution looking to empower rather than destroy them. Their solution not only protects kirana store owners, but also improves the lives of the millions of families that they serve.”
Proving Reaction’s hypothesis of anywhere to everywhere
Pongrith Chantraporn, a Reaction Investment Advisor in Asia, commented, “The problems that Jumbotail are solving for in India are similar to what we see here in Southeast Asia. Studying innovative solutions like Jumbotail will help many small businesses in other regions to innovate and digitize quicker.”
Scaling this approach will positively change tomorrow
Reaction Board Director, Singari Seshadri, who is also Head of Stanford Venture Studio, is excited about the role that she believes Reaction can play in spurring and scaling innovation at scale. a critical role in solving the innovation problem that exists today. “The more examples like Jumbotail that we can source from anywhere, and promote to everywhere, the bigger the difference we will make in positively changing tomorrow for millions of people.”
For further information about Reaction or Jumbotail, media queries or interview requests, please visit the Reaction website at www.reaction.global or contact the Reaction team at change@reaction.global.
Reaction is about creating exponential change. We are a global community of entrepreneurs, investors and executives who share a vision for a world where innovation can meaningfully change more lives in less time. Why now? Because more innovations will be created in more countries and more industries over the next decade than in the previous 50 years. Many will offer the potential to solve global issues. But will fail to reach the markets they could have benefited most. Reaction was founded by a global team of Stanford alumni who united to solve this problem together. Our mission is to measurably improve one billion lives, within a decade, by scaling innovations that will change the world.
Jumbotail is India’s leading new retail platform for food and grocery. By fundamentally reengineering the food and grocery value chain in India using technology, data science, and design, Jumbotail’s ambition is to create fair access to markets and increased economic opportunities for India’s ecosystem of millions of mom & pop “Kirana” grocery retailers, brands, and staples producers and farmers.