Months after the collapse of his beauty and content commerce unicorn, Good Glamm Group’s Darpan Sanghvi is staging a comeback with a new venture. On Wednesday, Sanghvi unveiled 'CoFounder Circle', an AI-native acceleration platform aimed at helping startups and small businesses access the people, tools, and capital needed to grow.
In a LinkedIn post announcing the launch, Sanghvi acknowledged the personal and professional toll of Good Glamm’s unravelling, describing himself as “the ultimate failure” and recalling the “crippling self-doubt” that followed. “I was the founder of a company that scaled and then failed. And when you fail after that scale, you fail hard and real people get hurt,” he wrote.
CoFounder Circle, he said, was born out of rediscovering purpose while mentoring younger founders. The platform will connect entrepreneurs with potential co-founders, interns, and operators, along with service providers, AI-powered SaaS tools, mentors, incubators, and investors. Generative AI, Sanghvi said, will be central to the platform’s offerings, allowing businesses to access automation, analytics, and decision-making support.
In a move unusual for Indian startups, Sanghvi pledged to hand over nearly 50% of CoFounder Circle’s equity to its community—including employees, ecosystem partners, and even ex-Good Glamm stakeholders who had vested stock options. The gesture, he said, was part of his effort to repair the damage from his previous company’s downfall.
The Good Glamm Group, once valued at over $1 billion, had pursued an aggressive roll-up strategy in beauty and media but collapsed earlier this year under the weight of soaring losses and stalled funding. Lenders eventually forced a breakup of the group, selling its brands piecemeal. Sanghvi, who co-founded and led the venture, admitted the company’s strategy was “too much, too fast, too big”.
With CoFounder Circle, Sanghvi is positioning himself at the intersection of AI, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. The platform will offer incubation programmes and demo days where startups can pitch to investors. “This time, if it clicks, this will not just be a meaningful business, but more importantly we will make a real impact on the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem,” he said.
Edited by Swetha Kannan
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