The office was closed, and the founder wasn’t there. In May this year, Appie sent out word to the media that it had raised $1 million in bridge funding from HNIs in India and Europe which it said would be used for product launch, customer acquisition and business development. Appie is a two year old company run under Appie Mobiquity Pvt Ltd. The company was founded by Kartik Sanghavi in 2014 and offers a platform for connecting offline stores in a 5km radius of a user who could add items to their cart and get it delivered. Currently, Appie has both a user facing and a merchant facing Android app, listing 45 lakh products across categories. The user app has installs in the 10,000-50,000 range, and a rating of 4.7, while the merchant app has 1,000-5,000 installs and a 4.8 rating. The fundraise of $1 million that never came through On the 15th of June, Kartik sent out an email to employees stating that due to “certain unforeseen circumstances and broken commitments,” salaries for May and June had been delayed. He added that he had exhausted the ‘planned allocation for this product in October 2015 but had created a runway for another year till December 2016.’ Two investments from which he was exiting were stuck, but he had received commitment for a $1 million investment from HNI investors, which would come in the first and second week of July. On the 1st of July, Kartik sent an email to the team (the “Appiening…
