Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

Gurgaon based personal finance startup iTrust Financial Advisors has been acquired by Karvy Private Wealth, the deal details has not been disclosed. Karvy has bought all the assets and operations of iTrust which mainly operated in NCR, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

iTrust was founded in mid 2006 by Dhruv Agarwala and Kartik Varma both Haravard Business School Graduate. iTrust raised investment in 2007 from Angel investors and have 150+ workforce Pan India.

iTrust works on both online and offline model, engages with users in their home loan, personal loan, mutual funds and other financial product execution. They charge fees from product manufacturing firms by selling their products and also on commission basis from end customers for processing their loan documents.

On iTrust platform a user can create and track financial planning, iTrust also has immense information on loans, life insurance, health insurance and user can gain information on the processes, can analyze/compare various financial products from manufacturers.

With this acquisition, Karvy will grow its wealth management and financial planning business. This will also enable the company to enter tax preparation and filing service thereby becoming one of the largest non banking wealth management businesses.

Lets have a look at monthly traction at iTrust -

-Hitesh, vcBYtes.com

TutorVista, yesterday announced that Pearson, the world’s leading education company, is acquiring a majority stake in the company at an equity valuation of $213 MM (about Rs.960 crores). TutorVista is a global education services company that is the largest online tutoring company in the world and through Edurite, its Indian subsidiary, a leader in ICT, tutorials and schools business in India.

Started five years ago to create a global education company that makes education accessible and affordable,  TutorVista and Edurite are recognized as leading education companies in US and India. TutorVista.com has grown at a rapid pace with six million visitors per month visiting its site. TutorVista has served over five million tutoring sessions till date to students worldwide. The company has two thousand teachers and has helped more than 100,000 students achieve their education goals. Pearson will gain a strong foothold in the online education space and in the large Indian education market with this acquisition.  Pearson is already an investor in TutorVista for the last two years and was very impressed with the management team, its vision and passion and the rapid growth of both TutorVista and Edurite.

Jointly, Pearson and TutorVista, plan to grow the online education business rapidly by integrating online tutoring into all of Pearson’s digital products, selling it to schools and higher education institutions and by offering further educational services globally.  With Pearson’s global reach in more than 60 countries. TutorVista will launch online tutoring and language coaching services across the globe. Both companies will work on providing world-class educational content to students, open more schools and grow the tutorial business significantly.

Pearson has experience of education and publishing for over two centuries with world famous brands like Longman, Penguin and Prentice Hall.  More than half the schools in US use Pearson products.

TutorVista has raised over $33 MM in funding from leading venture capital firms – Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and from strategic investors- Manipal Education, Medical Group and Pearson.
With this acquisition.

Great time for investors like Sequoia Capital which first invested $2M in Tutorvista.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Salesforce, the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced it has completed its acquisition of Dimdim, a web conferencing and meeting tools provider for approximately $31 million in cash.

Acquisition will extend salesforce.com’s Chatter collaboration platform with critical real-time communication technologies It follows the proven Facebook model of combining real-time collaboration and communication into a single integrated service. Enables salesforce.com to build on momentum of 60,000 Chatter customers, accelerating the industry shift to Cloud 2.

By offering an integrated collaboration and communication platform, the company believes it will drive greater Chatter adoption, increase customer loyalty and differentiate its entire product portfolio.

DimDim is a hyderabad based startup founded by D.D. Ganguly and Prakash Khot in 2007. Dimdim has created critical real-time communication technologies such as presence, messaging and screen sharing. Dimdim is financially backed by Index Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Draper Richards ,they must be making a handsome exit with in 3 years.

Dimdim provided hosted meetings, similar to Citrix’s GotoMeeting. Free meetings were made available for up to ten users. Professional meetings with collaboration tools for up to 50 users were also made available for US$25 per month, and webinar hosting for up to 100 users or 1,000 event attendees was available for US$75 per month.

I have been a big fan of DimDim and have used their premium account earlier and currently was on free plan, sad to find it will remain active till March 15.2011.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Flipkart, India’s largest online bookstore today announced that it has acquired weRead, the largest social network based book recommendation and review platform. Though the acquisition amount wasn’t disclosed.

The weRead acquisition allows Flipkart to leverage advanced recommendation technologies and social graph information to enhance customer experience. With more than 3 million readers and 60 million books, weRead captures user-generated information such as who, within your social network, has marked a book as a favourite, detailed reviews and user ratings of books.

The weRead application is available across all popular social network sites such as Facebook, Orkut, Yahoo, MySpace and Hi5. Considering that purchase of books, as a category, is driven by reviews and recommendations, weRead provides an edge as it would immediately showcase community verdicts on any book.

The weRead component will make buying online at Flipkart a heightened social experience. Owing to its community-driven, independent nature, weRead will retain its own brand identity, even after the purchase by Flipkart.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

KineticGlue, an enterprise focused social collaboration company today announced the acquisition of Injoos, a company building social media tools for the enterprise. The acquisition expands KineticGlue’s offerings and will accelerate its own product development. KineticGlue is Bangalore based company founded in 2008 by design expert Meeta Malhotra and Vivek Paul(formely CEO of Wipro Technology)

Injoos was founded in 2008 by Jagdish Vasishtha and Srinivas Seshadri, both formerly with Infosys.  Injoos team-ware organizes both content and collaboration technologies around team-based goals and enables contextual use of these technologies.Teams can quickly start working on projects and collaborate with friendly tools to achieve their goals while creating valuable knowledge assets.

Enterprises across the world have turned to social applications to retain and engage talent, make information flows more collaborative, and unleash innovation. KineticGlue is a leader in this space in India and has already built strong industry expertise in Banking (Yes Bank, ICICI Bank), Healthcare (Fortis), Infotech (L&T), Retail (Future), Telecom (Airtel) and Education (BITS). In addition, KineticGlue already has over 200 medium to small sized companies in its network.

“KineticGlue has built a strong installed base in large and medium sized companies in India over the last year and we have received terrific feedback on our product features and usability case studies” says Vivek Paul, adding that “The Injoos team and their product will strengthen and enhance our offerings for the Indian market across multiple industries. I am pleased to welcome the Injoos team to KineticGlue”.

Jagdish and Srinivas will both join the company’s board and respectively be COO and CTO of KineticGlue. Says Jagdish, ‘There are few products that can improve productivity, enhance employee morale, and deliver on the innovation promise – all at the same time – so we are very excited about this opportunity. Customers from both companies have already endorsed the value we bring and this combination of technical strengths of Injoos and market reach of KineticGlue will create a global leader in social business”.

Companies have used social applications to improve sales pursuits through real time collaboration, engage distribution partners through specialty communities, improved project management through common document repositories, reduce attrition by giving employees a chance to express their creativity, and enhanced new product development by increasing cross department connections.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

NetAmbit, one of India’s leading Financial Services Distribution Company is all set to expand its horizons in online space with the acquisition of Rupeetalk, the leading personal finance portal.  With Rupeetalk’s acquisition NetAmbit will be able to start internet enabled model for fulfillment of leads.

It combines Rupeetalk’s online ability to offer comparisons on financial products and other information alongwith with NetAmbit’s offline reach in reaching the customer and offering him what is best.

Rupeetalk is an intermediary portal that serves as a bridge between users of this Site and providers of personal finance products in India. Rupeetalk provides consumers a platform to compare product offerings by various financial institutions and educate them so that the consumer would make a more informed decision.

Lets look at the monthly traction of Rupeetalk:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	44K
Unique visitors (users)	33K
Page views	110K
Total visits	48K
Avg visits per visitor	1.5
Avg time on site	4:10

NetAmbit is backed by Helion Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, while Rupeetalk was backed by Seedfund.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Last week an Indian based automotive content portal Carwale has been acquired by Axel Springer AG, one of the largest multimedia companies. They picked up a 52.1% stake in Automotive Exchange Pvt Ltd, the owner of automotive classified ads portal Carwale, though the valuation and transaction details haven’t been disclosed.

Carwale certainly expanded their product and service offering, they quickly transformed from mere content provider to auto deal maker – right from managing test driving process till closing the sales. I personally experienced their high quality service when i was planning to buy a 4 wheeler in Bangalore. Carwale perfected the skill of lead generation, lead management and how to nurture the leads for significant time period.

India Today Group also acquired 18.3% in Carwale, owned by Automotive Exchange Pvt Ltd, taking the total stake sold to 70.4%. The remaining stake is with the founders led by Mohit Dubey and also employees. The founders have sold part equity.

Carwale is founded by Mohit Dubey was backed by Seedfund, an early stage fund and Sierro Ventures which infused $7M in 2008, It is learnt that both the VC firms have exited in this transaction, however deal size wasn’t disclosed.

Monthly Statistics of Carwale -

Unique visitors (cookies)	1.3M
Unique visitors (users)	700K
Page views	17M
Total visits	2.1M
Avg visits per visitor	2.1
Avg time on site	16:40

The classified ads portal monetizes by selling customer leads to new car dealers and to used car brokers and also by running automobile campaigns.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

HolidayIQ, a bangalore based travel information startup has merged with  Singapore based online travel meta-search engine Wego Pte ltd. Interestingly the combined entity has also raised series B capital from Tiger Global Management.

Wego is meta search engine which allows travelers to search for flights, hotels and packages and crawls leading travel websites (meta search) on a real time basis and shows latest pricing and availability of tickets.

HolidayIQ provides content related to travel, hotels and vacation. HolidayIQ mainly generates revenue from lead generation, and caters the lead to hotels and travel agents. Recently HolidayIQ has been expanding its international travel packages to cater to Indian travelers willing to explore foreign tourist locations.

Monthly Statistics of HolidayIQ -

Unique visitors	390K
Unique visitors	350K
Page views	3.4M
Total visits	560K
Avg visits per visitor	1.6
Avg time on site	9:00

Monthly Statistics of Wego -

Unique visitors (cookies)	970K
Unique visitors (users)	560K
Page views	2.7M
Total visits	1.1M
Avg visits per visitor	1.1
Avg time on site	3:20

Statistics clearly states Wego attracts more visitors than HolidayIQ, but later being more a content player leads in the page views number.

The original promoters of HolidayIQ – Hari Nair and Vinu Krishnan – will continue to retain their stake, and post the merger, there will be no change in management of HolidayIQ. HolidayIQ was funded by Accel Partners(they exited as per the sources), BBCL private treaties.

WeGo was founded in 2005 by former executives from Intercontinental Hotels Group, Yahoo! and had previously raised its Series A round of funding from News Digital Media.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Komli Media, Asia Pacific’s leading digital media network platform, announced today that it has acquired Indoor Media, the UK’s leading online ethnic marketing media company, further strengthening its position and operations in international markets. This is Komli’s second acquisition since June, as it aggressively expands its international operations.

Founded in 2007 by Murly Tiwari and Jay Rai, and headquartered in London, Indoor Media has established itself in the UK market as the leader in online ethnic marketing with a focus on South Asians. It has built a strong reputation by providing unique and effective solutions to brand marketers helping them reach out to the UK’s ethnic minority consumers through its proprietary ad network, AdMasala.

Covering more than 400 websites across verticals like News, Business, Entertainment and Women it offers an aggregate UK reach of 2.6 million ethnic minority unique users, primarily comprised of South Asians. South Asians are the largest ethnic minority group in the United Kingdom, representing around half of all of ethnic minorities according to the latest national census. Indoor’s clients include marketers such as Mercedes, the UK Government, O2, Vodafone and Western Union among others.

Komli Media has built strong relationships with marketers and publishers and partners exclusively with top global and local publishers including Facebook, SanjeevKapoor and Babycenter amongst others in India, and Bloomberg and Hotfrog amongst others in Australia. With this acquisition Komli Media is now the leader in offering ethnic marketing solutions for Asian audiences in the four largest English speaking economies in the western world — Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States, a total population base of nearly 15 million.