FrontRow, a learning platform featuring celebrities, shuts down

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Photo credit: First row

FrontRow, a celebrity hobbyist learning and community platform in India, has been shut down, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed.

The three-year-old startup wanted to build a community where well-known artists and athletes would teach consumers their craft. The startup had raised around $18 million and counted Elevation Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Not Boring Capital among its backers.

FrontRow co-founder Ishaan Preet Singh confirmed the development to TechCrunch, adding that the startup is exploring talks about acquiring intellectual property and the possibility of returning the unused capital to investors.

FrontRow grew to annual sales of $3-4 million but struggled to grow from there, Singh said. At that point, he said, it had become clear that the company wasn’t risk-scalable. FrontRow cut most of its jobs last year and gave itself a few months to try out a few pivots.

In a previous note, Singh said:

As of November last year, FrontRow is again a seed company with about 35 people on the team while we conducted several experiments to find PMF in the non-academic learning space. We conducted three to four experiments, including professional learning for adults and holistic offline development for children. Some of them, especially the offline part for kids, are encouraging and with a lot of user love, but still early days.

We (founders and investors) had always set ourselves a June deadline to take a step back and reflect on the pilots we’ve been running, and although we’ve made great progress and have a positive CM outcome (albeit a very small company) , We have several conversations about where the best place for the company is, including whether the market is big enough to support an independent player, or whether it’s a better fit for a larger, multi-category company. We’ll find out over the next few months. We have kept the team updated here as well and are helping some of them find alternative jobs if they wish. This is not a capital or runway issue (we have over 3 years runway issue), it is more about making sure you are honest in raising capital with a vision to build a great business, if this is feasible in a particular market when you learn more.