Yash
Kewalramani

Yash Kewalramani did the math. At Swarthmore College - a place known for producing thinkers who refuse to accept the obvious answer - he studied mathematics and economics. He learned to look at a system, find its inefficiency, and ask what would happen if you removed it. It took a few years in product management and a front-row seat to how India's D2C brands were bleeding money to marketplaces before he found one worth fixing.

The system was this: a small skincare brand sells on Myntra or Nykaa, pays 30-40% in commissions, gets shelf space among ten thousand competitors, and watches customers forget its name the moment they close the app. The brand paid for the transaction but didn't earn the relationship. Yash looked at this arrangement and saw a transaction that made no sense for anyone except the platform.

That observation became Cherry App. The premise is almost brutally simple: if a customer already posts about a product on Instagram, pay them for it. Not in loyalty points or discount codes that expire in seven days. Real money, wired directly to their bank account. The customer earns 30 to 70% cashback; the brand gets a genuine recommendation from someone who actually bought the product; and no marketplace collects a toll in the middle.

From Jupiter to Launch

Before Cherry, Yash spent time building products for others. He worked at LIDO, the edtech platform, then moved to Adappt Intelligence, which built smart space solutions for commercial real estate. His sharpest product instincts, though, came from his time as a Product Manager at Jupiter - one of India's most design-forward fintech startups. Jupiter taught him how to build consumer products that people actually want to use, not just products that technically work.

In 2024, he co-founded Cherry App alongside Sharnam Singhwal and Samarth Mahapatra, registering the company as Superbuzz Marketing Technologies Private Limited in Mumbai. The name "Superbuzz" is almost a confession of what they're really building: a word-of-mouth engine that scales. All In Capital came in as the first institutional backer, a signal that the model resonated beyond the founders' conviction.

The Mechanics of Making Friends Pay You

Cherry targets Instagram creators in the 1,000 to 100,000 follower range - a tier that platform economists call micro-influencers, but that Yash thinks of more simply as: people with engaged audiences who buy things. The app lists 70+ D2C brands. A user browses, buys, receives the product, and then posts about it on their Instagram feed, story, or reel. Cherry verifies the post - that the purchase was real, that the brand was tagged, that the content was authentic - and deposits the cashback.

The math works because UGC (user-generated content) is notoriously hard to fake and disproportionately effective. A post from someone's actual Instagram feed, with their actual followers, carries trust that a brand's own feed post doesn't. For a brand paying 40% to Myntra for the same transaction, a 50% cashback payout that also generates real social proof is actually a better deal. Yash's pitch to brands is: you're not giving a discount. You're buying verified word-of-mouth.

The Honest Argument

Yash doesn't oversell it. In a LinkedIn post that attracted pointed criticism from investors and founders, he laid out Cherry's thesis against the marketplace model - and then engaged directly with the pushback. One commenter cited Stanford research suggesting customer lifetime value plateaus after seven orders, making marketplace visibility cost-effective over time. Another questioned whether compensated posts could ever feel authentic. Yash didn't delete the comments or pivot to corporate-speak. He debated back.

That willingness to argue in public - to post a thesis and defend it in the comments - is an unusual trait in early-stage founders who typically stay quiet until they have enough traction to silence the skeptics. It's either confidence or stubbornness. Possibly both. Either way, it makes Cherry's public presence more interesting than its competitors'.

The company's Instagram account has a similar energy. One early reel showed Yash himself addressing the camera in mock-serious tones: "Please type in the comments if you have been adversely affected by usage of our app." It's the kind of marketing that only works if the product is actually good - and if the founder trusts the audience to get the joke.

Swarthmore's Fingerprints

Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania is a small school with an outsize reputation for producing people who are, politely speaking, very sure of their analysis. During his time there, Yash didn't just study mathematics and economics - he became a CS21 Ninja, a student mentor for the introductory computer science course. The role was part teaching assistant, part peer guide, and it tells you something that he gravitated toward it. He wanted to help people understand systems.

It's a through-line. At Adappt, he helped companies understand their physical spaces through data. At Jupiter, he helped users understand their money through clean product interfaces. At Cherry, he's asking brands to understand that their customers are a distribution channel - if they'd only pay them to be one.