Why Perplexity Founder Aravind Srinivas-Backed Astra Couldn't Survive Amid AI Agent Hype - Explained

Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas-backed SaaS start-up ‘Astra’ has shut down its operations due to cofounder differences. Astra cofounder and CEO Supreet Hegde made the announcement in a post on LinkedIn, while greeting investors who supported the Software-as-a-Service venture.

“It is with a heavy heart and mixed emotions that I am announcing the closing of Astra,” said Hegde, while adding that the Astra journey began with a dream to “automate all non-customer-facing tasks of sales representatives”.

He stated that crowded sales tech market pushed the founders to invest countless hours into creating a product called Astra. “Working with larger companies meant navigating lengthy sales cycles, especially as an early-stage start-up asking clients to trust us with sensitive data from platforms like Salesforce, G-drive, Slack, and CLM,” he noted.

According to him, the current surge of interest and accompanying confusion around AI agents has added another layer of complexity to the landscape. Many clients, he noted, are unsure of whom to trust or how to evaluate these emerging artificial intelligence tools, which has made decision-making even more challenging.

“Despite our best efforts, as co-founders, we found ourselves at different crossroads regarding the pace of growth. It is a challenging decision, but we have chosen to part ways and bring this chapter to a close. We are deeply grateful to our angel investors and mentors, who supported us through all the chaos we faced together,” Hegde added.

Astra was founded in 2023 by two IIT Madras graduates – Supreet Hegde and Ranjan Rajagopalan. It offers an AI-powered sales analytics platform for businesses for workflow execution. Perplexity's founder joined Astra as an angel investor in March this year.

The start-up claimed that it could automate 80% of an account executive’s workload and streamline deal execution. In addition, it even stated that it onboarded two enterprise clients during its beta testing phase.

Hegde has not disclosed his future plans yet. Before Astra, he was the vice president of global business development for enterprise tech start-up HyperVerge.

On the other hand, it is reported that another cofounder, Rajagopalan, is working on a new start-up. Currently, the new venture is in stealth mode. He was associated with Google and the AI text-to-video conversion platform Proshort before starting Astra with Hegde.