Sanjay Sethi

Sanjay Sethi (born 27 June 1972) is an Indian internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and long-time CEO of ShopClues.com, India's first "managed marketplace" and one of the country's early e-commerce unicorns. He trained as a mechanical engineer, earning a B.Tech from IIT (BHU) Varanasi in 1993, and later completed an advanced course in software technology at IIT Delhi in 1996. He was recognized with IIT-BHU's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016.

Sethi began his career at Steel Authority of India (SAIL), working as a junior manager at the Rourkela Steel Plant (1993–1995), before moving into IT roles at IIS Infotech and HCL Perot Systems. He then moved to the United States, where his path led through TradeBeam Inc., a SaaS global trade-management startup in San Francisco (development manager, ~2002–2004), and ultimately to eBay in Silicon Valley. At eBay he served as Global Product Head for Shipping & Logistics and Payments & Billing — the deep marketplace, payments and logistics experience that shaped his later ventures.

In 2011 he co-founded ShopClues in Gurgaon alongside Sandeep Aggarwal and Radhika (Ghai) Aggarwal, targeting unbranded and value goods sold through a merchant-led marketplace model. He initially ran products as VP (Products) and took over as CEO in October 2013. Under his leadership ShopClues grew to tens of millions of products and roughly half a million merchants, raised capital from Tiger Global, Nexus Venture Partners, Helion, GIC and Bessemer, and reached a ~US$1.1 billion valuation in its 2015 Series E, joining the unicorn club in 2016. The company was acquired by Singapore-based Qoo10 in 2019. Sethi was named CEO of the Year by both CMO Asia and CEO India Awards in 2016.

More recently, Sethi has moved into artificial intelligence: in 2024 he founded CygnusAlpha AI, a Gurugram-based research company focused on building large-scale generative AI models for scientific research, drug discovery and enterprise automation. He continues to invest personally as an angel in early-stage companies.

• Invests as an individual angel, deploying personal capital at the seed stage in exchange for equity.
• Strong affinity for consumer internet, marketplaces, e-commerce enablement, payments and logistics — the domains he built and scaled operationally at eBay and ShopClues.
• Brings an operator's lens: known as a marketplace "guru" and product visionary, he is positioned to back founders building complex, transactional online ecosystems rather than single-feature apps.
• Given his 2024 pivot to CygnusAlpha AI, his current interest skews toward applied / generative AI and technically ambitious, R&D-heavy products.
• Note: publicly documented angel activity is limited, so specific check-size figures are not disclosed in verifiable sources.