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

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

Snapdeal.com, the biggest deals & discount internet company in India has closed $40M as series B investment led by Bessemer Ventures and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and IndoUS Ventures also participated in this round. As per Kunal Bahl, Founder & CEO of Snapdeal this investment seems to be the largest Venture capital infusion in an internet company in a single round.

Interestingly Snapdeal has raised $12M in the month of January fron Nexus Venture Partners and IndoUS Ventures, thus total investment raised by Snapdeal has touched $52M. Earlier it was reported by Economic Times that Snapdeal is in talks with Bessemer Ventures and existing investors to raise 200Cr at 1000Cr Valuation.

Snapdeal claims to be adding 1.5M new users every month, their merchant base has crossed 30,000 and their deals and discount are available in over 50 cities in India. Snapdeal plans to expand its team and would like to take it upto 800 within this year.

Lets take a look at their monthly traction:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	11M
Page views	34M
Total visits	18M
Avg time on site	3:20

Couple of months back Snapdeal introduced voucher of phone service. The new service allows users of snapdeal to avail deals bought from the website without having to carry a print out of the deal. The transaction is carried out through the SMS message that the customer gets on the registered mobile number after buying a deal. This initiative has given good results to the company catering to the 30% of its user base which access deals on their mobile.

In June 2010 Snapdeal has acquired Bangalore based deal startup Grabbon.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

BigshoeBazaar, an online wholesaler and retailer of shoes, apparels etc has closed its series B round of investment of $9M from Narayanmurthy floated Catamaran Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. The deal was almost done after BigshoeBazaar raised its series A investment.

With this new investment Catamaran Ventures has picked up 13 per cent stake in the online firm for Rs 26 crore, Nexus Venture Partners has picked up 7 per cent stake for Rs 14 crore. The funds will be used to strengthen supply chain and setting up warehouses to support growth at the front-end,” Bigshoebazaar India Co-founder Manmohan Agarwal said.

BigshoeBazaar primarily runs a B2C portal Yebhi.com formerly known as Bigshoebazaar.com which sell footwear mainly and now it has added few more categories like Clothing, jewellery. Yebhi.com does around 4000 transactions on a daily basis. Bigshoebazaar runs a wholesale network across the country targeted at small retailers in Tier2 and Tier3 cities to source Global brands like Adidas, Nike etc. which in general don’t have access to such brands. Bigshoebazaar has also started franchisee business, where it offers shoe retailers to use it brand and retailers source the footwear from the company.

You may check out Nitin Agarwal’s interview here, Nitin is one of the Cofounder of BigShoeBazaar.

Lets look at the monthly traction at Yebhi.com:

Worldwide
Unique visitors	840K
Page views	9M
Total visits	1.2M
Avg time on site	8:50

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Fidelity Growth Partners India (FGPI) invests up to $15M to acquire a significant minority stake in Mind Shaper Technologies Private Limited. Branded as Classteacher Learning Systems, the company is a pioneer in K-12 educational content in the country.

The investment will be used to enhance the company’s current product portfolio and broaden its offering for new technology like tablets in classrooms. Classteacher offers an integrated solution to assist teaching in classrooms using software, hardware and school support services. At present the company has one of the largest repositories of digital education content in the industry with about 85,000 teaching modules mapped to multiple education boards.

As part of this investment Mr. Kabir Narang and Mr. Raul Rai with FIL Capital Advisors (India), the private equity advisory arm for FGPI will join the board of the company. Commenting on this, Kabir Narang said, “We are excited to partner with Mind Shaper Technologies and be a part of the large and growing education sector. The company has an exhaustive content library that can be leveraged beyond digital whiteboards, a reference base of leading schools across the country and a strong management team”.

Mr. Rohit Pande, CEO, Classteacher Learning Systems, said “This investment will help us enhance our product offering as well as expand into new segments of education. We see this as a key milestone in our evolution and are glad to partner with FGPI to achieve our goal to support learning in classrooms across India.”

About Fidelity Growth Partners India:

Fidelity Growth Partners India (FGPI) is the India-focused private equity arm of Fidelity International, focused on cross-sector growth capital investing. FGPI seeks to invest in high-quality, high-growth companies in India across a broad range of sectors with typical investment sizes ranging from $10 million to $50 million. FGPI is committed to making the companies it invests in leaders in their industries through access to patient capital with a long term investment mindset, a powerful network of resources and a team of investment professionals with a proven track record of success. FGPI’s investments include Coastal Projects, Manthan Systems, NetMagic Solutions, PL Engineering, Shreem Electric, Transpole Logistics and VMC Systems.

About Classteacher Learning Systems:

Classteacher Learning Systems is a pioneer in educational content in the country with over 85,000 modules, 500 schools and 0.5 million students. Classteacher offers an integrated solution to assist teaching in classrooms using software, hardware and school support services.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Exclusively.in, a private flash sale site has raised $16M from Tiger global, Accel partners India and Helion Venture Partners.  As of now the company has been targeting NRIs living in US and sells Indian attires such as saris, tunics, jewelry and very traditional wedding gowns etc.

Exclusively.in plans to utilize the fund in expanding their distribution network, doubling its workforce. Exclusively.in plans to become an international player in this space and will expand its flash sale site to 50 countries, 30 countries will be covered by this year end. Their deliveries will start to UK from the mid week of June. Exclusively.in will be catering to Indian audience from the 3rd Quarter of this year.

Like FashionandYou Exclusively.In sends out a daily email containing the several styles it has for sale. Members who subscribe to the email are able to purchase the items at a discount until the inventory is gone.

Lets have a look at their US and Worldwide traction –

Country Worldwide Unique visitors (estimated cookies) 120K 130K Unique visitors (users) 77K 92K Page views 2.1M 2.2M Total visits 260K 270K Avg visits per cookie 2.1 2 Avg time on site 8:40 8:00

Exclusively.in was founded in mid 2010 and have offices in NewYork and New Delhi currently. Exclusively.in has raised $2.8M in Nov 2010 from Helion Venture partners and Accel Partners.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

ThePrivateSales.com a flash sale site promoted by Bangalore based TPS shopping Outlet Pvt Ltd has raised $5M from a private company. ThePrivateSales was founded in mid 2010 by Sunder and Sajan Gianchandani as a flash sales website offering high-end products by Indian and global fashion labels.

Investments will primarily used in adding more brands in the inventory and also increase man power and open offices and warehouses across all the metros. Good part of Investment will go into brand building and marketing,ThePrivateSales plans to invest heavily on online and viral marketing, they would spend nearly 1Crore on it.

Unlike FashionandYou, Theprivatesales deals with high end designer labels like Versace, Renata Riggi etc. Since founders have vast experience in fashion industry they are leveraging their experience in striking fantastic deals. I personally like the categorization of products at ThePrivateSales.com, easy to find products, and like FashionandYou where all brands of a particular category are placed in one webpage. Discounts offered by ThePrivateSales are pretty good compared to other flash sale sites.

ThePrivateSales.com claims to have above 4L registered users, their monthly sales are growing at 50-60%. Major competitors in this space are – 99Labels.com, Bagittoday, Fashionandyou.com, Exclusively.in

Lets have a look at ThePrivateSales monthly traction -

ThePrivateSales.com has healthy traction, and with investments coming in its all poised to go upwards.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

FirstCry, a pune based online retailer for kids and babycare products has raised investments of $4M from SAIF Partners. The investments will be utilized in scaling up the operations, setting up the engineering team and warehouses for speedy delivery of products.

FirstCry is run by BrainBees Solutions Pvt Ltd and is founded by Sunil Maheshwari and Amitava Saha. Sunil is a serial entrepreneur and had earlier co-founded Brainvisa Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which was sold to Indecomm Global Services in 2007. Brainvisa had raised $5M from Sequoia Capital.

FirstCry has tied-up with over 100 brands like Mattel, Funskool, Hotwheels, Disney , Barbie, Zapak and offers a range of over 4,000 products including Pampers diapers, Johnson’s skincare range and cycle maker BSA’s prams and strollers. FirstCry aims to cover the complete gammut of parenting – from clothings for new mothers, babycare products and toys for little grown up kids.

Currently, it does 200 transactions a day. The portal has plans to expand to newer markets in Asia like Srilanka, Indonesia and Malaysia. As per Sunil the market size is very large – it is a $5 billion opportunity, and  growing very fast in  tier 2 and 3 cities. Around 35% of FirstCry orders come from towns and the demand is huge, considering the lack of options, access and range. It is a prime market for e-commerce firms.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com