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Neel Murthy

Advisor at Cravd

New York, New York

Overview 

Neel Murthy is a Y Combinator founder, investor, and advisor, known for his role as the former Head of Growth at Goldbelly and being part of the YC W13 Alum. With a background in product management and marketing strategy, he has a strong track record in driving growth and innovation in various tech startups. Murthy's career highlights include leading growth initiatives at Goldbelly and co-founding Swapbox, showcasing his expertise in product development and entrepreneurship. Currently, he serves as a Senior Venture Partner at Pioneer Fund, demonstrating his commitment to investing in and supporting early-stage companies.

Work Experience 

  • SVP

    2017 - Current

    Founding Investment Partner of Pioneer Fund. Former Visiting General Partner. We’re top decile VC investors and are the most active YC Investors.

  • Venture Partner

    2025

Palm Drive Capital is built on the fundamental belief that innovators are everywhere.

  • Chief Growth Officer

    2019 - 2024

    Led best in class teams including organic growth, paid growth, lifecycle growth, partner growth, product & data science, which all together delivered >15X revenue growth during my tenure. Alongside our CEO, led fundraising efforts to secure $100M in capital.

  • Head of Product

    2018 - 2019

Goldbelly is an online delivery platform for specialty food makers and artisans.

Raised $133,120,000.00 from Spectrum Equity and Intel Capital.

  • Chief Innovation Officer

    2017 - 2018

    Acquired Swapbox in 2017. Joined the team to help transition the product and finalize the acquisition while providing solutions on how Swabpox and other new technologies could help innovate their suite of offerings to customers and clients.

SDBIC is a proprietary insurance company that safeguards the contents of safe deposit boxes.

Raised $400,000.00 from Advantage Capital and Advantage Capital.

  • CEO & Co-Founder

    2012 - 2017

    ACQUIRED IN AUGUST 2017 By SDBIC! YC W13 - http://gigaom.com/2013/03/26/yc-winter-2013-demo-day-five-startups-to-watch-afternoon-edition/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/y-combinator-company-swapbox-launches-and-aims-to-pick-up-where-bufferbox-left-off/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/09/swapbox-knew-that-google-would-eventually-come-to-the-bay-area-with-bufferbox-remains-focused/

  • W13 Batch

    2013 - 2013

    Joined YC as a W13 company with Swapbox.

  • Student

    2006 - 2012

    M.S. in Computer Science / MBA Candidate (dropped out to start Swapbox & join YC) B.S. in Computer Science Minor in Human Biology

  • Product Manager (former Engineering Intern)

    2011 - 2011

    PM on Words With Friends for Facebook - Created specs and launched new features for WWF on Facebook, including the popular game board screen shot feature that allowed users to share the cool/exciting words they played with their friends - Managed statistical analysis (post-mortem and expected numbers) for my own features as well as already existing ones Initially worked as a software engineer on Scramble With Friends and built a sizable portion of the game

Zynga is a mobile game developer that creates and operates social games as live services played on the Internet.

Raised $2,318,550,786.00 from Kleiner Perkins, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley and Fidelity.

  • Lead Developer

    2010 - 2011

    Joined that company once it was out of Stanford's StartX program, which was founded and financed by one of LinkedIn's Co-founders. Then after the lead developer left in early 2011, I took over that role. - mlp was a tool for power users of LinkedIn to use it better and was made under the guidance of Konstantin. - managed technical team (redmine for ror development) and worked on one of the core features of mlp, awards.

Articles About Neel

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