Peak XV Partners, a leading venture capital firm in India and Southeast Asia, has seen a fresh round of senior departures. These follow other leadership exits over the past year as it pushes ahead with plans to deepen its focus on AI investing and expand its footprint in the U.S., while keeping India as its largest market.

The latest departures stem from an internal disagreement with senior partner Ashish Agrawal (pictured above, left) that led to a mutual decision to part ways, Managing Director Shailendra Singh told TechCrunch. He added that two other partners, Ishaan Mittal (pictured above, right) and Tejeshwi Sharma (pictured above, center), chose to leave alongside him.

Singh said Peak XV did not want to go into the specifics of the disagreement and was focused on moving forward. “Just out of privacy, and out of, like, trying to be classy about it,” he said. Singh added that such departures were not uncommon at large, multi-stage venture firms and that Peak XV wanted to move on quickly after several years of working together.

All board seats held by the departing partners would be transitioned “imminently,” Singh said, noting that the firm already had overlapping representation across several portfolio companies. He said Peak XV was not concerned about continuity, noting that multiple general partners and operating partners were already involved across many of those boards.

The departures mark the exit of long-tenured investors from the firm. Agrawal had been with Peak XV for more than 13 years, while Mittal spent over nine years at the firm and Sharma more than seven years, per their LinkedIn profiles.

Agrawal wrote in a LinkedIn post that he had decided to “take the entrepreneurial plunge” and was teaming up with Mittal and Sharma to start a new venture capital firm. He described the move as an opportunity to build a new institution with longtime partners and thanked Peak XV’s leadership for what he called a “truly wonderful partnership.”

During his time at Peak XV, Agrawal led investments across fintech, consumer, and software, including Groww, one of the firm’s most prominent IPO exits in 2025. He also backed multiple early- and growth-stage companies alongside Mittal and Sharma, contributing to Peak XV’s broader portfolio build-out over the past decade.

Agrawal, Mittal, and Sharma did not respond to messages for comments.

Peak XV has also moved to strengthen its senior leadership from within. The firm on Tuesday promoted Abhishek Mohan to general partner, expanding its investment leadership bench, while Saipriya Sarangan was elevated to chief operating officer, taking charge of firm-wide operations.

The leadership changes come amid a standout year for Peak XV’s portfolio exits. Five of its companies — Groww, Pine Labs, Meesho, Wakefit, and Capillary Technologies — went public in November and December 2025, generating roughly ₹300 billion (around $3.33 billion) in unrealized, mark-to-market gains for the firm, in addition to about ₹28 billion (about $310.61 million) in realized gains from share sales during the IPOs.

In addition to the latest departures, Peak XV has seen a broader churn in its senior ranks over the past 12 months. Last year, long-time investment leaders Harshjit Sethi and Shailesh Lakhani exited the India team, while Abheek Anand and Pieter Kemps departed from the firm’s Southeast Asia operations. The firm has also seen leadership changes across its marketing, policy, and operations teams in recent months.

Singh dismissed a view circulating in the market that many of the partners who drove Peak XV’s largest exits were no longer at the firm, calling the narrative “not statistically true.” He said several of the firm’s most significant outcomes had been led by long-tenured partners who remained at Peak XV, and argued that the firm’s exit track record did not hinge on any single individual.

Peak XV currently has seven general partners, along with multiple partners and principals, according to Singh.

The VC firm, which split from Sequoia Capital in 2023 and currently manages over $10 billion in capital across 16 funds, has made about 80 investments linked to AI, Singh said, highlighting its push to deepen its focus on AI funding. It is also preparing to open a U.S. office within the next 90 days as it expands its global footprint, per Singh, while continuing to view India as its largest and most important market.

Singh stated the firm believed AI would reshape venture investing more profoundly than previous technology shifts, arguing that successful AI investing required investors with deep technical understanding rather than “generalist” experience. He added that Peak XV was looking to add more AI-native talent, including researchers and engineers with backgrounds in machine learning and large-scale model development.

The firm has invested in more than 400 companies, and its portfolio has seen over 35 initial public offerings and several M&As to date.

Fitbit founders James Park and Eric Friedman have announced the launch of a new AI startup called Luffu that aims to help families proactively monitor their health. The duo are developing an “intelligent family care system” that will start with an app experience and then expand into hardware devices.

Two years after their exit from Google, Park and Friedman are betting on AI to help lighten the mental burden of caregiving. According to a recent report, 63 million, or nearly 1 in 4, U.S. adults are family caregivers, up 45% from 10 years ago.

Luffu uses AI in the background to gather and organize family information, learn day-to-day patterns, and flag notable changes so families can stay aligned and address potential well-being issues.

“At Fitbit, we focused on personal health—but after Fitbit, health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself,” Park said in a press release. “I was caring for my parents from across the country, trying to piece together my mom’s health care across various portals and providers, with a language barrier that made it hard to get complete, timely context from her about doctor visits. I didn’t want to constantly check in, and she didn’t want to feel monitored. Luffu is the product we wished existed—to stay on top of our family’s health, know what changed and when to step in—without hovering.”

The pair note that today’s consumer health market is filled with tools for individuals, but that real life health is shared across partners, kids, parents, pets, and caregivers. Family information is scattered across devices, portals, calendars, attachments, spreadsheets, and paper documents.

With Luffu, people will be able to track the whole family’s details, including health stats, diet, medications, symptoms, lab tests, doctor visits, and more. Users can log health information using voice, text, or photos. Luffu proactively watches for changes, and surfaces insights and alerts, such as unusual vitals or changes in sleep.

The pair told Axios that people can ask questions using plain language to ask about their family’s health, such as “Is Dad’s new meal plan affecting his blood pressure?” or “Did someone give the dog his medication?” 

“We designed Luffu to capture the details as life happens, keep family members updated and surface what matters at the right time—so caregiving feels more coordinated and less chaotic,” Friedman said in the press release.

People who are interested in Luffu can join the waitlist for the limited public beta.

TikTok has largely recovered from a slight dip in active users in the days following its ownership change, when a group of American investors took control of the video app’s operations in the United States. The decline, though brief, benefited competing video apps like UpScrolled and Skylight Social, which saw rapid user adoption as some looked for TikTok alternatives.

According to estimates from digital market intelligence firm Similarweb, TikTok saw usage dip into the range of 86-88 million daily active users in the U.S. immediately after the ownership change. That compares with a typical average of 92 million daily active users.

The app has bounced back to more than 90 million daily active users, indicating that many who left TikTok have since returned.

As TikTok saw a small dip in usage, alternative video-sharing apps UpScrolled and Skylight Social began growing quickly. Although only a tiny fraction of TikTok’s size, UpScrolled topped 138,500 daily active users at its peak on January 28; it has now dropped back down to 68,000.

Meanwhile, Skylight Social hit 81,200 daily active users, according to Similarweb’s estimates and has since dropped to 56,300 daily active users. Overall, Skylight Social saw its user sign-ups increase to 380,000 as of late January, the company told TechCrunch.

TikTok’s usage decline, which prompted some to try the new apps, wasn’t driven by the ownership change directly, but rather by how users feared it would impact their TikTok experience. There were growing concerns about TikTok’s updated privacy policy, which gave the app permission to track users’ precise GPS location. (This addition could be related to TikTok’s tests of a “Nearby” feed to show users videos from local creators, but was added to the policy alongside the change in ownership, leading to user backlash over privacy concerns.)

When reading the privacy policy anew, some users also discovered disturbing language, like how TikTok said it may collect users’ “immigration status,” among other personal data. However, this turned out to be a reference that was included because of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which requires businesses to inform consumers if they collect certain sensitive data. TikTok does that — in the sense that anything someone shares on the platform in their video content technically becomes part of the platform, so it requires disclosure.

In addition, TikTok experienced an unfortunately timed, multi-day data center outage, which caused the app to not function properly, sometimes breaking search, likes, and comments, causing video glitches, disrupting the algorithm, and creating issues with the in-app chat. Users believed these glitches meant TikTok was now censoring their content, which sent them looking for alternatives.

The company announced on Sunday evening that the data center outage was resolved, chalking it up to a winter-storm-driven power outage.

As users made peace with the new terms and conditions and the outage-driven issues were resolved, users returned to the platform, Similarweb’s data shows. But there’s still hope for the newcomers, as the firm notes that TikTok’s usage has been slowly declining over the latter part of 2025, when usage peaked at 100 million daily active users from July to October 2025, compared with the 90+ million seen now.