Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

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

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

BabyOye, an e-commerce startup in babycare products has raised $2.5M from Accel partners and Tiger Global. Primarily investments will be utilized in hiring people, expand its supply chain, build warehouses and increase product range.

BabyOye started by husband-wife duo – Arunima Singhdeo and Sanjay Nadkarni, an ex Infoedge executive who understands Indian online space quite well. Babyoye has tied-up with over 80 brands and offers a range of over 4,000 products, including Pampers diapers, Chicco food, Johnson’s skincare range. BabyOye certainly wants to make a mark in this multi billion dollar market.

BabyOye also offers products for new moms, making it an shopping platform for both new born babies and new mom.

Its been barely 6months they started BabyOye and managed to raise handsome series A funding from reputed VCs is just unbelievable. One of the main competitor for BabyOye is Coimbatore based Hushbabies.

-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

Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service which uses cloud computing to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization.
Dropbox received seed funding from Y Combinator and then raised Venture capital from two reputed VC firms – Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, Dropbox was launched in September of 2008 and it has attracted millions of users and is growing rapidly.

vcBytes readers may like this presentation where founders of Dropbox discuss the lessons learned while creating and promoting it.

Parallocity, head-quartered in the Silicon Valley with a Product Engineering Center in Bangalore,  which develops high performance runtime program analysis and defect detection frameworks announced that it has closed Series A round of funding from venture capital firm Accel Partners.

Parallocity has created a virtual machine for program analysis and error detection, especially for multi-threaded / concurrent programs.  Zeus Virtual Machine (ZVM) brings in a new dimension to software testing and quality by incorporating best of current research in computing coupled with innovative applied testing methodologies. By empowering software developers and quality engineers find complex software errors with ease, Parallocity is paving way for next generation of software applications which take full advantage of the computing capabilities of state-of-the-art multi-core/ multi-processor platforms.

Subrata Mitra, Partner at Accel Partners, take the board seat at Parallocity. Parallocity houses an exceptional team delivering the next generation of capabilities in complex program analysis,” said Subrata Mitra, Accel Partners. “Investment in Parallocity is in-line with Accel’s mission to partner with companies that are truly path-breaking. We commit Accel’s global network of resources to help Parallocity scale quickly and realize its true potential.”

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Chakpak is like Indian flixster which  provides loads of information about movies, film personalities. They have some fun features like wallpapers, quizs, forums, movies trailors, celebrity news etc which appeal to movie enthusiasts. Chakpak is a web2.0 startup and has social networking feature which allow user to add friends and allow them to see photos, movies they have bookmarked. User can also view the reviews, ratings and discussion of its friends on Chakpak. I like the bollywood news section, its quite comprehensive.

Chakpak was founded in 2007 and received $5M funding from Canaan Partners and Accel Partners till date.

Chakpak’s orkut and facebook app is quite popular, app enables allow users to take up quiz, compatibility tests. Lets have a look at their app traction on facebook -

 Lets analyse the monthly traction at Chakpak portial-

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	2.4M
Unique visitors (users)	1.7M
Reach	0.1%
Page views	10M
Total visits	2.9M
Avg visits per visitor	1.7
Avg time on site	4:00

Chakpak has been making money through advertisements by playing role of publisher, Ads seems to be their lonely means of monetizing. With 10M monthly pageviews Chakpak makes atleast Rs. 10L/month. But question arises is it enough revenue to achieve break even through ads.

What can be the new means of making money for Chakpak, share your feedback and suggestions.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Groupon is now valued at more than one billion dollars. It joins social networks Facebook and Twitter and online gaming company Zynga in a very small club of web 2.0 startups. Groupon, the social buying site that has become one of the hotter start-ups of late, has gotten a giant round of funding from the same Russian investors who backed social networking powerhouse Facebook and game phenom Zynga.

Digital Sky Technologies is the main funder of the round, but Battery Ventures is also participating.

The money, the company said would be used to grow the business–and to speed far ahead of numerous rivals–as well as cash out employees and early investors. Groupon is profitable and has about 270 employees.

In December, Groupon nabbed $30 million in its second round of funding, led by Accel Partners.

The innovative Chicago-based service, which launched only a year ago, had previously received $4.8 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, as well as $1 million from an angel investor.

Groupon features a daily deal with a huge discount on a wide range of things–from spas to skydiving–in 26 U.S. cities, including Chicago, Boston, New York and San Francisco, for large groups of potential buyers on the Web, through email or via social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Can Indian clones of Groupon will achieve valuation of $1M, check out related post here.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com