Trimax offers comprehensive range of services such as Compute infrastructure, network infrastructure, software solutions, turnkey solutions, managed network services, cloud computing, data centre services, facility management services, virtual private services and web design and hosting.

Trimax is promoted by S P Madrecha and C P Madrecha and it has offices in key cities in India and employs around 1800 people on its pay roll.

Company had partnered with BSNL for its managed network services business and with ITI Limited for the ITI data centre that it has developed in Bangalore and currently operates under the ITI brand name.

It has partnered with technology providers such as Cisco, HP and Microsoft to offer systems integration, network rollout and maintenance and cloud computing services to companies and government agencies.

Trimax has earlier raised $10M investments from Bangalore based PE firm Zephyr Peacock in 2010 and Banyan Tree Growth Capital in 2009.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Zivame, Bangalore based online lingerie retailer has raised series A investment from IUVP and IDG Venture Partners.  Series A investment amount hasn’t been disclosed.

Zivame was founded by Richa Kar (CEO)  and Kapil Karekar (CTO) in mid 2011. Zivame houses prominent lingerie brands like Enamor, Amante, Inaya, Triumph etc and also sell white labelled products under Zivame brand. It houses more than 12,000 SKUs and ships through out India.

According to T.C Meenakshisundaram, Managing Director, IDG Ventrures India Advisors, “Zivame is a leader in the category of lingerie which lends itself extremely well to ecommerce. This category has many successful companies globally. Zivame has one of the best team comprising varied experience in retail, technology and strategy.”

Richa Kar, says, “In the lingerie industry the most important word is “fit”, and we have found ours in IDG and Indo US. The funds will be utilized towards providing top notch customer experience and making many more brands and product available for our customers, scaling our technology and operations and to create many more consumer touch points.”

Vani Kola, Managing partner, Indo US venture Partners says, “Zivame is clearly differentiated in its offering. The focus on content and consultation is unique to the industry.”

Lets look at Zivame monthly traction:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	290K
Unique visitors (users)	100K
Page views	1.2M
Total visits	280K
Avg visits per cookie	0.96
Avg time on site	6:00

Zivame competes directly with Mylace, StrapsandStrings, herstyle.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Edusys, Test preparation and Certification company has raised $7.5M from Sequoia Capital. Edusys started in 2004 by Tridibesh Tripathy, an IIT-IIM and Wharton School graduate saw a massive opportunity in test preparation and certification space. Global market size of test preparation and certification is pegged to be be around $50B.

Edusys intends to use the funds to expand its business through new product introductions and to strengthen its core team and technology platform, it plans to double its workforce in a year.

Edusys has developed learning platform which is highly scalable and imparts virtual learning with great ease. The courses are designed to provide maximum flexibility to students with innovative training styles and easy accessibility

PMStudy is Edusys poster boy portal and is quite popular among the mid level managers across various sector. Edusys also caters to Six Sigma, ITIL, Prince2 learning and certification.

Lets look at the monthly traction of PMStudy:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	43K
Page views	1.1M
Total visits	46K
Avg time on site	16:40

Another company which is directly competing with Edusys is Simplilearn which also target global audience through its learning management platform.

Test certification space is really heating up and VCs are readily backing the interesting companies in this space.

-Hitesh, vcBytes

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

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