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Taggle Internet Ventures, an internet company which launched its online group buying initiative, taggle.com has received $8.75 million from Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners. The taggle.com promises to provide both the consumers and merchants a win-win platform.

Taggle has decided to use this funding for improvement in technology, marketing to drive traffic and increase its service performance. Taggle works with a variety of business partners from wellness to beauty, travel, adventure sports, fast food and fine-dining.

At present Bangalore is the base for Taggle’s “test market” which would be later introduced in “10 internet strong cities.” John Kuruvilla, Founder and CEO of Taggle said, “We spent about four months understanding the markets, what customers want and issues faced by the trade.” He added that customers want simple propositions and not the complicated ones with fine prints and asterisk.

Most of the people do not wish to transact over the internet, as 20-25 percent of the people get affected by the payment gateway. To solve such problems Taggle has come up with a contact center and Taggle Prepaid. The Taggle Prepaid works like a mobile prepaid recharge and earns a two percent bonus from it. Thus it does not require the customer to go through the payment gateway again.

Marketing through SMS is also an option as customers will be able to call the Taggle contact center on receiving the offer and pay via credit card. To protect the merchants from fraud, a security hologram has been created based on the coupons.

Arvin Babu, Partner, Greylock Partners, which has invested in companies like Facebook and Linkedin, said, in a statement, “India is definitely one of the world’s fastest growing markets and we see great potential in the concept of Group Buying in India. The business proposition of Taggle is certainly promising and we are sure it will take the market by storm.”

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com