Nintee shuts down after a year — Wingify founder Chopra returns unspent VC money

A consumer app that used AI to help people build better habits to transform their lives.

Nintee was the third company founded by Paras Chopra, after VWO and Wingify. Its original hypothesis was to use AI to help people build better habits to transform their lives; the idea attracted a passionate niche and venture backing from Peak XV Partners, Kunal Shah and others.

The team could not build conviction that habit change could be a VC-scale business and abandoned the initial idea. A second pivot explored education and learning ideas, where Nintee quickly discovered that building a successful consumer app today is very hard.

In April 2024 Nintee announced it was shutting down operations a year after launch. The majority of the funding raised was still remaining and would be returned to investors over the next few weeks; impacted employees got four months of severance and offers to join Chopra's other company VWO at the same salary.

The failure is explicit about cause: the team stopped when conviction in the market size broke, not when the money ran out.

A rare Indian startup ending in which investors get most of their capital back — a precedent for how founders can wind down responsibly.

The second pivot failing the same test shows the constraint was the consumer-app market, not the first idea's execution.

Contrast with the founder's own Wingify — bootstrapped and profitable — frames when venture capital fits a business and when it does not.

Returning capital is the honest end of a failed conviction test: a famous founder, a passionate niche and fresh VC money do not substitute for belief that the market is big.

As of April 30, 2024, Nintee was winding down: the majority of the raised funding was being readied for return to Peak XV Partners, Kunal Shah and other backers over the following weeks, and staff had four months of severance or a same-salary transfer to VWO. Chopra's bootstrapped Wingify kept compounding, with FY23 revenue up 16.8% to Rs 223 crore. Around half a dozen Indian startups had announced shutdowns in 2024 to date, including Resso (India), Rario, OKX (India), Muvin and GoldPe.