Published: October 22, 2026
StartupFeed Quick Take
- Different raised a $48 Mn seed led by General Catalyst, announced on October 20, 2026.
- Six investors backed it, including Together Fund, the India SaaS fund started by Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham.
- Bengaluru is one of only two cities where the company is hiring. The launch statement names San Francisco only.
Ajeet Singh, who co-founded Nutanix and ThoughtSpot, launched his third company Different on October 20 with a $48 Mn seed round and a Bengaluru team.
Different’s launch statement of October 20 names six backers. General Catalyst led. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Together Fund, Haystack Ventures, MXV Capital and Firebolt Ventures joined.
The product is already running campaigns. Descope, an early customer, used Different to find and redirect 60% of paid spend lost to poor targeting.
Motif, another customer, went from one campaign at a time to more than a dozen across four channels. That took one month.
Motif runs its marketing with three people. That works out to roughly four live campaigns per marketer, up from one for the whole team.
The Bengaluru Half of a San Francisco Startup
Different is registered as Different Labs, Inc. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Its careers page names only two hiring locations: San Francisco and Bangalore.
The October 20 launch statement does not mention India at all. It names San Francisco once, in the dateline, and stops there. The company’s own website is where Bengaluru shows up.
Different says the $48 Mn will go into its engineering and go-to-market teams. Bengaluru is one of the two places that money can hire.
One of the six investors is Indian. Together Fund was started by Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham and Eka Software founder Manav Garg. It launched with an $85 Mn corpus to back SaaS companies built by Indian founders.
The company did not disclose how many people it employs, in either city. It also did not disclose a valuation or a customer count.
What Ajeet Singh Built Before Different
Ajeet Singh co-founded Nutanix in 2009. The hybrid cloud company listed on the Nasdaq in 2016. He left in 2012 and started ThoughtSpot, a search-driven analytics company, the same year.
ThoughtSpot has raised more than $670 Mn and was last valued at close to $4.5 Bn, by Inc42’s count. Singh served as its executive chairman before starting Different.
Singh studied at IIT Kanpur and IIM Calcutta. He worked at Oracle, Honeywell and PwC before his first company.
The marketing problem came from inside ThoughtSpot. A team of about 50 people worked across dozens of tools there. Singh says that doing more marketing meant hiring more specialists and buying more software, at both Nutanix and ThoughtSpot.
The three companies line up like this.
| Company | Year Singh started it | Where the money went |
|---|---|---|
| Nutanix | 2009 | Listed on the Nasdaq in 2016 |
| ThoughtSpot | 2012 | Over $670 Mn raised, valued near $4.5 Bn |
| Different | Out of stealth in 2026 | $48 Mn seed |
What Different Does for a Marketing Team
Different plans a campaign, builds the ads, emails and landing pages, and launches them across channels. It then watches the results and shifts spend towards what works. Marketers review and approve every piece before it goes live.
The system also does answer engine optimisation. That means tracking how a brand shows up inside AI answers, then recommending and writing content for it.
It keeps a shared memory of a company’s strategy, brand and past results. What it learns on one channel it applies to the others, and to the next campaign.
Descope’s marketing is run by two people. Abhi Iyer, who heads marketing at Descope, said two of them run as many as ten programmes at once.
Singh described the split between the marketer and the machine.
“Marketers own the strategy and the creative ideas.”
Ajeet Singh, co-founder and chief executive, Different. From the company’s launch statement, October 20, 2026.
Why This Lands on Indian SaaS Marketing Teams
Indian B2B software companies sell to the same buyers these customers do. A tool that lets five marketers do the work of fifty changes what a lean Indian SaaS team is expected to produce.
It also changes hiring. Singh’s own description of Nutanix and ThoughtSpot was that more marketing meant more specialists on the payroll. Different is selling the opposite, and building it partly with Bengaluru engineers.
Two of the three founders learned the problem inside Indian companies. Abhinav Yajurvedi, the chief technology officer, built marketing infrastructure at Flipkart and Myntra. He was also chief technology and product officer at PharmEasy.
Abhishek Pani, the chief product officer, led the machine-learning team behind Adobe’s marketing products. He has spent more than two decades in marketing, data and AI.
Nothing here is an India revenue story yet. The company named no Indian customer, and gave no India sales plan.
What this means for you: If you run marketing at an Indian B2B SaaS firm, or you build marketing systems in Bengaluru, this one matters to you. Check different.ai for open Bengaluru roles, and test the 60% wasted-spend claim against your own paid campaigns this quarter.
StartupFeed Insight
The money is American and the engineering runs across San Francisco and Bengaluru, which is now the normal shape of a US-India AI startup. What is new is the pitch. Different is selling a cut to the marketing headcount that Indian SaaS firms spent a decade building. Its two named results, 60% of Descope’s paid spend redirected and Motif’s jump from one campaign to twelve, came from companies with two and three marketers. Those are tiny samples. Watch for the first Indian SaaS customer named publicly. If the company has not named one by the end of March 2027, the India story stays a hiring story.
By Avinash Mishra, Business Correspondent
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