Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

HealthKart, gurgaon based online retailer has raised $5M from Sequoia Capital and Omidyar Network as part of series B round.  In April 2011 HealthKart had raised $1M from Kae Capital and Sequoia Capital.

Primarily the investments will be utilized in strengthening the product portfolio, supply chain system and good chunk of investments will be deployed in marketing.

Healthkart, is founded by two IIT-D graduates – Prashant Tandon and Sameer Maheshwari. They have able to bring in some talented entrepreneurs in their core team, for instance Animesh Jain is head of Online Marketing & Product, Animesh was CEO and Cofounder of iTasveer.

Healthkart which began as online health store has expanded its product portfolio, now it sells baby care, cosmetic products as well.

Lets have a look at their monthly traction:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	–	150K
Unique visitors (users)	–	69K
Page views	–	1M
Total visits	–	150K
Avg time on site	–	8:00

-Hitesh, vcBytes

Canaan Partners, the venture capital firm that focuses on the US, India and Israel, has closed its ninth fund at $600 million. The new fund has been backed by  both new and existing LPs and it takes the firm’s total assets under management to $3.5 billion.

About two-thirds of the fund corpus will be put toward digital media, consumer internet, mobile and communications companies, with the rest earmarked for biopharma, medical device and healthcare infrastructure investments.

“We’ve had the privilege of working with outstanding entrepreneurs – often over a long haul because it takes time to build a valuable company, and it’s rarely a straight line to get there,” John Balen, general partner at Canaan Partners.

Canaan’s current Indian portfolio companies include BharatMatrimony, which claims to be the world’s largest consumer internet site for matrimonial services, business support services provider iYogi, shopping portal Naaptol and legal process outsourcing firm UnitedLex. Recently Canaan Partners has led $45M investment along with Intel Capital at Happiest Minds, an IT services firm founded by former Mindtree Chairman Ashok Soota. Canaan funded web company – Chakpak was acquired by Flipkart.

-Hitesh, vcBytes

Classle is creating a social learning network, with the focus of Learning. Classle connects not only individuals but also private learning environments. Classle offers free service to students pursuing higher education to enhance their academic and professional level.

Classle is founded by Vaidya Nathan, He had previously worked with Cognizant Technology Solutions where he held many portfolios including Head-Global Innovation Office, Global Head – Learning and Research, Chief Architect, etc.

Classle provides fast, easy and free access to a wide variety of organized contents. Classle help learners find highly valued, targeted, appropriate and closely related information quickly. Classle’s technology-powered online platform, which integrates social technologies together, takes a learner beyond the narrow confines of their Institution.  Freeing the learner from the limitations of their present Knowledge Group, it puts them in a virtual learning group of educators, professionals and peers of their own choosing.

Classle allows you to create and access posts, pages, edit and clone learning based content, join and participate in groups and discussions and network with others to seek and give help. Classle has a simple and intuitive user interface. This way both technical and non-technical learners can easily search, create, manage, and track their preferred contents.

Recently Classle has introduced new feature “Classle Events” targeting at educational institutes, its a service to make organizing events like seminars, symposium, paper contest, Business Plan contest, etc., enjoyable and easy.

Organizing academic events is a very important part of a College experience. This is a crucial vehicle to not only broaden the scope of learning beyond what is offered in curriculum and increase scope of interaction outside the class and institute boundary, but also give students experience in creativity, managerial and leadership experience.  Classle Events takes all those drudgery out and lets you increase the experience and success of the event itself.

The partnership benefit comes along with Campus Classle©, Classle’s unique cloud campus platform and PlacementNet©.

-Hitesh

Nadhi Technologies, a 2.5yr old Chennai based SaaS startup has developed  lightweight, easy-to-use construction supply chain solutions for real estate and infrastructure construction projects.

Nadhi.in is founded by two civil engineers – Vaidyanathan and Ravi. S. Mundoli from IIT-M; Both have worked in manufacturing SCM at i2 Technologies before founding Nadhi.  Nadhi is incubated out of the IITM Research Park.

Nadhi provides easy-to-use supply chain management (SCM) tools toreal  ensure the synchronous on-site arrival of labour and materials per the updated construction schedule through the life of the project.

Nadhi’s core solution is a project monitoring and control solution with a mobile extension  – nPulse™ that reduces the information latency between various stakeholders in a construction project to zero and transitions business from reactive to proactive. Nadhi has built the industry’s first procurement planning solution that uses inventory management theory to optimize material procurement costs in construction.

In short, Nadhi builds solutions that complement ERP systems. Nadhi offers business process consulting to help transition companies to a managed platform. Nadhi also offers lean construction consulting practice.

Nadhi’s target customers are EPC contractors, infrastructure project owners, real estate developers. The market size for IT in construction is estimated to be about $5 billion and the potential to expand worldwide also exists. Nadhi’s revenue sources are software revenue – both subscription (SaaS model) and enterprise license options are available and consulting services.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Fashionandyou, an online flash sale site which specializes in fashion and lifestyle product  has raised $40M investments in its series C round. This round of investment was led by Mayfield fund and Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) along with Intel Capital, Nokia Growth Partners and Sequoia Capital.

This is the third round of investments at FashionandYou which was founded in January 2010, FashionandYou is owned by Smile Group Venture and Goldsquare Sales India Private Ltd. It was co-founded by former Yahoo India Sales Director Uppal, and backed by Smile Group founder Harish Bahl. In Dec 2010 Sequoia had invested $8M in this flash sale site.

Primarily funds will be utilized for strengthening its supply chain system, expand into additional categories, and make strategic acquisitions to complement their existing business lines. FashionandYou aims to become a 500Cr company in two years time.

Lets look at their recent monthly traction:

Traffic statistics All traffic statistics are estimates

Region Worldwide Unique visitors (estimated cookies) 1.3M 1.3M Unique visitors (users) 690K 690K Page views 34M 34M Total visits 2.6M 2.6M Avg time on site 14:30 14:30

FashionandYou already has a customer base of around 3M and with this massive funding coming in things looking quite rosy for them.

I am seriously wishing to see a massive improvement in their delivery cycle, then only they can get back some of their early adopter like me.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Start up killers are those said statements that may lose the funding for the entrepreneur. When pitching to investors about the new product and business proposition, there is some moment when you know that you have lost your listener. One misspoken comment and everyone wants to leave as soon as possible. Lets look at few turn offs

No Competition

There is always competition. In some way customers are fulfilling their needs today. Competition can be as simple as continuing to do things as they are doing them today. Never ever say there is no competition. Investors look for proven and tested market which is growing. Investors may not be keen to invest in saturated markets like OTAs in India because they often require too much capital to overcome the incumbents, not because they are not viable.

Being Conservative

Majority of the Indian entrepreneurs i have met seem to believe that VCs want to hear that their numbers and estimates are conservative.  As an entrepreneur you should know Investors know that backing a start up is a very risky business, and conservative isn’t what they are interested in, nor is it what they expect.  There are plenty of conservative, less risky investment vehicles like Post Office schemes, MF available to investors.

Missing the Detailing

If you are entering entering into a market and not understanding the nuances of the business will cause failure. Do your homework and establish a process to get all the details and nitty-gritty of an industry and customer that make a product successful. For instance if you want to start an e-commerce company make sure you have detailed out all of flows/vendor relationship involved in it. Investors want to know the startup has experience in the market.

Break Through Technology

Seriously! as an entrepreneur if you say to investor you have developed a break through technology, then be prepared to say immediately why. Most investors will not believe you and it is generally considered as Myth.

Negative Attitude

Remember Investors invests on Entrepreneur and not on idea, they would like to see, assess entrepreneur attitude. So appear coach able, Every time an investor asks a question, they are impacting valuable information.  Not listening or addressing their concerns is a start-up killer. Becoming defensive when they ask questions is negative as well.

Disregard for Investor Money

Having an apparent disregard for the investors money will often sink a deal or make investors wary of what is to come of the startup in the future.  Recently i came across a pitch where two co-founders presented to angel investors and when one investor asked what if the start up encountered problems and hit the roadblock, they immediately replied they would just go back to their old jobs.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

a2zbaby, a Mumbai based startup is a new e-commerce player in the baby care product vertical. a2zbaby aims to provide an e-commerce storefront where parents can find and discover products for their baby and buy it at will.

a2zbaby offers, chemical safe products, considering the safety and development of the child at each stage. a2zbaby delivers wide range from diapers to toys, car seats to cozy bouncers, food maker to laundry detergent and specialty child care products to designer cribs.

a2zbaby is founded by Premanshu Singh (IIM-A alumnus) and Kapil Chawla (MDI Gurgaon Alumnus). Premanshu has rich experience and worked in ITC, J&J and Webaroo Technologies while Kapil has worked with Infosys and Webaroo. Since they being the parents of new born babies they felt the need of an online store where user can find different brands under one place.

a2zbaby has more than 2500 SKU’s, across more than 25 brands, on offer now. Parents can visit the portal, explore products, talk to a product expert and buy it online. a2z doesn’t levy and shipping charges, Cash On delivery is available for orders above 999, provides 24*7 customer support and delivery time varies from 3-7 days depending on the user location.

a2zBaby, is very fairly simple to use. They have well planned page layout with neat categorization. Checkout is very easy and simple and works like a breeze.

a2zBaby directly competes with Hushbabies, Babyoye, FirstCry.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Got some old mobile phone to get rid off? don’t know how and where to dispose it off, here is a good news for you. Attero, an end to end e-waste recycle management company has launched a B2C portal called AtteroBay, where user can trade his old phone for hard cash or gift a voucher.

Attero is encouraging the recycling and re-use of mobile phones. Atterobay provides an excellent solution to the hassled user who is clueless about how to responsibly dispose off his old cell phone.

Atterobay not only gives consumers and businesses an instant credit towards another device or cash back, but we also plant a tree for every device recycled. Attero has invested lot of capital and effort in developing and strengthening the reverse logistics, in arguably the backbone of their business.

So how does AtteroBay works- :

• User needs to enter model number and check value of the phone.
• Agree to type of payment and request for collection of phone. If a user doesn’t agree with the price quoted by Atterobay, user can fill in the price of their expectation. Attero then reviews the renewed offer and pay the consumer according to the worth of the old phone.
• Payment to the consumer

Here the customer can choose from multiple options including vouchers from our “Green partners” like Ferns n Petals, United Colors of Benetton, Costa Coffee and more or get cash in exchange of the phone. There’s even a great option for the ‘green conscious’ – of having a tree planted & maintained in the customer’s name.

I tried AtteroBay, they were excellent and helped me get rid of 2 old Nokia phones that I needed to discard. So if you’re looking for a fast, simple, and safe way to get rid of old mobile, Atterobay is the way to go.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

SureWaves Mediatech, a Bangalore based startup operating in the digital media technology space has received Rs 10 Cr from India Innovation Fund (IIF) & Accel Partners. IIF is  It is IIF second investment

Founded in 2006 by Rajendra Khare, Tapan Kumar and Anant Kansal, Surewaves offers the ‘Surewaves media grid’, an integrated advertisement aggregation, content delivery, network management, media planning and reporting platform. SureWaves is also active in the Digital Display Networks business.

The product addresses the Spot TV market and enables geo-targeted advertisements on national and regional cable channels.

IIF is promoted by Nasscom and IKP Knowledge Park, IIF offers investee companies the benefit of topnotch mentoring with advisors such as S Ramadorai, TCS vicechairman , and Kiran Karnik, former president of IT trade body Nasscom, who are on the panel. Start-ups also have the opportunity to work jointly with the marquee companies who are backing the fund.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Accel India has picked up stake by investing an undisclosed amount in New Delhi-based hospitality software firm HMS Infotech, which provides the Hotelogix software to run hospitality businesses. Hotelogix is a SaaS platform which offers  pay-as-you-go option for hotels of all sizes.

Hotelogix, is an ’Easy to Adapt & Simple to use’ solution that offers all that you might ever need as a Hotel Management Software to run your Hospitality Business smoothly. Hotelogix is targeting small and Mid-sized hotels.

Hotelogix covers the full spectrum of Hoteleiring tasks, both in terms of streamlining the internal operations, and enhancing your business reach to enable higher revenues & growth.

Hotelogix has an impressive feature, prominent ones are -

• Supports working in multiple currencies and in multiple time-zones.
• Unlimited point of Sale terminals to manage Restaurants, Spas, Room Service.
• Comprehensive property management system and frontdesk interface.
• Enterprise level auditing supported
• Robust reporting and revenue management
• Integration with GDS/IDS

Hotelogix is highly affordable platform. They have three pricing plans with plans ranging from $2.99 per room per month to $2000 one-time payment plan. The website is very informative and very intuitive and hotel executives can get started in less than 10 minutes. Hotelogix is gaining traction in the APAC, US & European Hotels.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com