20 Jan, 2012
indian startup IP Telephony Knowlarity Sequoia Capital SuperCaller SuperFax SuperReceptionist Venture Capital
Knowlarity Communications, a Gurgaon-based company that offers cloud telephony-based solutions has raised $6.5M investments from Sequoia Capital. This is the first investment in the cloud telephony space in India for Sequoia Capital, Mohit Bhatnagar will come on Knowlarity board.
The current round of funding will help Knowlarity scale its R&D facility in India, besides developing sales and marketing in the international market. At the time of inception, Knowlarity had raised a little less than $2 million from angel investors.
Founded in 2009 by IIT- Kanpur graduates Ambarish Gupta and Pallav Pandey, Knowlarity provides voice and data communication services over the internet to companies and individuals globally. As per Gupta the genesis of starting the company was to deliver simple and useful telephony products to help other businesses, primarily in the SME segment. Currently they have 40,000 clients who uses their products like ‘Super Receptionist’, ‘Super Fax’, ‘Super Conference’ etc.
Knowlarity has solved tracking and monitoring issues in the Mid-day Meal Scheme (a project for provision of lunch, free of cost to school-children, below the poverty line, on all working days) for the Government of Uttar Pradesh using a software called SuperCaller.
-Hitesh, vcBytes.com
13 Jan, 2012
ecommerce Healthcare HealthKart iTasveer Kae Capital Omidyar Network online retail Sequoia Capital Startup Venture Capital
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
11 Jan, 2012
BharatMatrimony Canaan Partners Chakpak Flipkart Fund raising HappiestMinds iYogi LPs Naaptol UnitedLex
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
