group-buying
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Vineet Rao and the small basket that became a billion-dollar bet
After a decade building software at Microsoft, Vineet Rao co-founded DealShare around a different customer: the household watching every rupee. A WhatsApp experiment in Jaipur became a venture-backed grocery business, then faced the harder arithmetic of scale.
Drop made the crowd part of the product
A $200 headphone helped turn a group-buying club into a hardware brand. Drop’s next chapter asks what remains when the community’s shop becomes a Corsair collaboration hub.
Pump.co
Pump.co is a San Francisco-based AI cloud platform that pools AWS commitments across hundreds of startups to deliver enterprise-grade discounts - up to 60% off - with no engineering work or long contracts. Founded in 2022 and backed by Y Combinator, it has grown into a multi-product 'intelligent cloud' covering cost optimization, visibility, and security.
Spandana Nakka
Spandana Nakka is the Founder & CEO of Pump.co, a Y Combinator-backed startup that cuts AWS cloud bills by up to 60% for free using group buying and AI. Indian-origin, UAE-raised, and Stanford-educated, Nakka spent four years as one of Google's early female PMs on Google Fiber and Google Play before co-founding Sleek (acquired by Snackpass in 2021) and then building Pump in 2022. Featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 for Consumer Technology, she leads an 88-person team making enterprise-level cloud discounts accessible to startups that can't negotiate alone.