Youngsters behind Tune Patrol win an exit, the story behind the deal

“We were proud of our product and what we had built. We had a niche but hardcore set of users who loved it but we needed money to continue and it seemed like no early stage fund wanted to touch the music space,” confided the 22-year-old Brijesh Bhardwaj, co-founder at Tune Patrol, after finally getting an exit.

Tune Patrol is a social music discovery platform that works towards developing and connecting a thriving community of independent musicians and their fans in India. The product was launched in March 2012 and is hosting content from close to 150 bands at the moment. TunePatrol is one of the star companies from the new breed of startups coming from BITS Pilani and it had also managed to raise angel funding to the tune of Rs 10 lakh.

Brijesh Bhardwaj, Saurabh Gupta, Karthik G, and Pronoot Barkakati are the co-founders at Tune Patrol. The young team, after a year and a half-long struggle with respect to opening up a sustainable revenue stream alongside trying to raise money to scale up quickly, realized that it is going to be tough.

“We were in a space none of the investors wanted to touch, especially after Flipkart shut down Flyte, although we were working on completely different 'SaaS for musicians' model, so we decided it would be better to start looking for people from the industry who would be interested to run it as a lifestyle business. It seemed like a better alternative to running out of money and being forced to shut down,” says Brijesh.

Both the team and their mentors started looking out for buyers and finally decided to go with a group of music executives who wanted to buy the product and run it with their own team. The founders were bought out but will continue to hold some equity in the new entity that will run TunePatrol and carry on as advisers. The names of the buyers haven't been disclosed at the moment.

The future of Tune Patrol and the road ahead for the founders

"Nothing changes for TunePatrol apart from the team, it will continue with the same vision, but now without the pressure of raising money," says Brijesh.

The founders are now looking out for new opportunities, Brijesh Bhardwaj has already moved to a product management role at InMobi. “We really had a great time building TunePatrol, we learnt a lot, especially since we did this right from our final year in college, and we would have loved to do more with it but we are happy that it is in good hands,” signs off Brijesh.

Website: Tune Patrol

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