Algo Legal has hired former law firm and in-house lawyer Ankit Guha, who had set up and sold an educational tech start-up to a US company within only nine months of starting it up.

Guha is joining Algo Legal as a partner in its Bangalore office, bringing the VC-PE-start-up plus technology specialist firm’s partner total headcount back up to 7.

Guha is a 2009 NUJS Kolkata graduate who had worked at Argus Partners in Kolkata, J Sagar Associates (JSA) and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas in Mumbai before joining VC fund WestBridge Capital Partners in Bangalore as vice president in 2017.

In 2019, however, he took the step of founding Fyraway - which is billed on his Linked-in page as “a unique game-based learning environment where children learn how to code”, by way of “bite-sized online games and assignments with the goal of teaching programming to kids”.

“I was responsible for product development and overall strategy and having scaled the company to 9000+ MAUS [monthly active users] by February 2020, had the good fortune to exit the business in March 2020, when a US edtech company acquired our primary products,” his Linked-in profile states.

He told us today that the business had been entirely bootstrapped and had grown to 8 full-time employees, though it would have eventually had to raise external capital.

“The truth is that 99 out of a 100 startups fail and I am aware of it,” he recounted. “So when we had the offer, we decided to take it. Of course, what could have been if we continued down that path will remain an unknown. I wrestled with it quite a bit, but made up my mind to sell in the end.”

While he was bound by confidentiality provisions regarding the purchaser and the price, he said that “customer acquisition costs were high” and since it was “still a very nascent space in India… you need to burn a lot just to educate customers”.

We had recently reported that former Algo partner Archand Chakraborty and principal associate Vijay Santosh had joined PwC.

Ankit GuhaWork history Jul 2019 - Mar 2020: Founder, fyraway (Bengaluru Area) Aug 2017 - Jun 2019: Vice President, WestBridge Capital Partners (Bengaluru) Jul 2016 - Jul 2017: Principal Associate, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas (Mumbai Area) Jun 2015 - Jun 2016: Principal Associate Designate, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas Sep 2011 - May 2015: Associate / Senior Associate, J. Sagar Associates (Mumbai Area) Oct 2009 - Jul 2011: Associate, Argus Partners (Solicitors & Advocates) (Kolkata) Apr 2009 - Aug 2009: Management Trainee (Legal), Asset Reconstruction Company (India) Ltd.Education 2004 - 2009: West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, B.A./LLB, Law