Welcoming Octoshop to the Genesis Portfolio
On behalf of Genesis, I’m excited to announce our investment in Octoshop. Octoshop is a browser extension-based shopping assistant that helps shoppers get the best e-commerce deals through cross-site price and product comparison and in-stock availability tracking.
— Anuj Jajoo (Venture Partner) and Sydney Fisher (Lead Analyst)
The Problem
Online retail has been growing exponentially for decades, but with new D2C brands, updated retailers, and an oversaturation of website ads, it’s impossible to know whether you’re getting the best deal. Coupon and discount aggregators like RetailMeNot and Honey marked a big shift by giving shoppers the power of data to shop better. However, these tools are limited to shoppers who have already decided their favorite brand or retail outlet. Octoshop takes this a step further and automatically compares prices of products across many e-commerce stores to ensure you get the best deal. It also tracks inventory for popular products, especially in technology, so that humans can beat resellers and buy what they need.
Through a web of data scrapers and now, official partnerships with leading retailers, Octoshop enables an average online shopper to competitively choose the best deal for their products of choice on the Internet. By also using a web extension, Octoshop is leading innovation in the new era of digital real estate: browser overlays.
The Founders
Octoshop was founded by Rithwik Pattikonda, Sriram Hariharan, and Darshan Bhatta, three technically talented UT CS students who have been active in the Longhorn startup ecosystem since day one. The idea for Octoshop came from a nonprofit effort at the start of COVID-19, when the team built Instok, a website to track availability of popular items in retail stores at a time when much of the country was unable to buy basic necessities. Once this phase passed, the team quickly connected the dots between their newly developed inventory tracking algorithms to the pandemic’s drastic e-commerce tailwinds.
Rithwik Pattikonda — CEO — Rithwik is a senior UT Computer Science student who is in charge of driving the vision of the company, from guiding product development to helping develop the company’s brand and growth strategy. Rithwik is a serial founder and previously led companies such as Gort’s Grilled Cheese and Apply.FYI. Outside of being a founder, Rithwik has also worked as a software engineer at Google and Sensara.
Sriram Hariharan — COO — Sriram is a senior UT Computer Science student who co-leads technical strategy and development. He primarily focuses on developing the front end of the extension. Sriram also works alongside Darshan to develop new aspects of Octoshop’s application. Previously, Sriram worked on both the Instok and Apply.fyi team as a software engineer. Outside of being a founder, Sriram has interned at JP Morgan Chase as a software engineer and at The University of Texas at Austin as a web developer.
Darshan Bhatta — CTO — Darshan is a junior UT Computer Science student who co-leads technical strategy and backend development, working alongside Sriram to develop new aspects of Octoshop’s application. Previously, Darshan developed multiple revenue generating side projects including Instok with members of the Octoshop team. Outside of being a founder, Darshan has also interned as a software engineer at Cloudflare and Esports One.
How’re They Doing?
Octoshop has had impressive traction since launch and now counts over 126,000 active users and 400 partnered e-commerce sites in their database. Currently, they are developing a comparison feature for shipping times to add more granularity to product comparisons from more niche sites. Additionally, they’ve gone viral (1M+ views) a few times on TikTok as the Gen-Z shopping extension that pairs well with Honey, showing increased marketing mindshare. Recently, the team also won 2nd place in the Contrary Texas Pitch Competition out of 8 top Texas student-founded startups.
Why I Led This Deal by Anuj Jajoo, Venture Partner
Octoshop is a pioneer within the young browser extension space that can truly build a new digital real estate to compete against an oversaturation of ad dollars in search and social media. I strongly believe this is the team to do it; Rithwik, Darshan, and Sriram have been entrepreneurial from their first year at UT, founding companies from dorm grilled cheese delivery to recruiting websites for fellow computer science students. When they pitched to Genesis, they already had a working product with thousands of users and a clear mastery of the back-end data algorithms driving their cross-website comparison vision. Throughout an extended diligence process, the team demonstrated coachability and significantly improved their product, showing a determination to turn Octoshop into a next-level company. I’m excited to go from a happy user to a prouder partner with Octoshop as they build the most user-friendly tool in online retail.
Anuj Jajoo is a Venture Partner and Portfolio Management Lead at Genesis, UT Austin’s startup fund.
