Astra
2023 - 2025, 3 years old
An AI chief of staff for sales reps that promised to automate most of an account executive's grunt work.
Astra was founded in 2023 in Bengaluru by IIT Madras alumni Supreet Hegde and Ranjan Rajagopalan, pitching software that could handle up to 80 percent of an account executive's daily tasks. Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas joined as an angel in an undisclosed pre-seed round in March 2025. Four months later the company was gone, having signed only two enterprise clients in beta, hampered by long sales cycles and customer wariness about granting an AI access to sensitive CRM and email data. CEO Hegde announced the shutdown on LinkedIn in late July 2025, citing irreconcilable differences with his cofounder over the pace of growth rather than any failure of the product. The frontier had also moved: broad sales-assistant tools were being swallowed by the industry's turn toward autonomous agents.
- Founded
- 2023-01
- Shut down
- 2025-07-31
- Funding raised
- Undisclosed
- Years alive
- 3
- Founders
- Supreet Hegde, Ranjan Rajagopalan
Sources
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