Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

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

MotorExchange, an online marketplace for used vehicles, has raised a second round of funding to expand its workforce and increase direct to consumer services.

The year-old start-up has raised about $5 million in a round, led by early stage investor Epiphany Ventures with participation from existing investor Canaan Partners.

MotorExchange provides a technology platform for transacting used vehicles. It brings together qualified sellers and volume buyers of used vehicles, including banks, corporates, leasing companies and automotive dealerships.

MotorExchange is founded by Vinay Sanghi, former chief executive of Mahindra First Choice, the start-up also has Rajan Mehra, venture advisor at Clearstone Venture Advisors and former India head, e-Bay as a founder-director.

MotorExchange charges buyers a commission fee and provides the services to sellers for free. MotorExchange has seller service office in Mumbai and Chennai. It has raised Series-A funding from Canaan Partners in December 2009.

Second hand automobile market is approximately 10,000 Cr in size and very fragmented in spite the presence of players like TrueValue from Maruti-Suzuki, Mahindra First Choice etc. Motorexchange aims to become #1 player in the second hand automobile market. On the institutional front, MotorExchange competes with eBay India’s B2B Motors business, Autoexchange.in and eDiig.in are others in this space.

Motorexchange has earleir raised 1st round of investment from Canaan Partners in dec 2009.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

There is a strong buzz in the market that Venture capital fund Canaan Partners is all set to invests in Naaptol a product comparison and shopping portal. Canaan Partners plans to pick up about 25% stake in Naaptol Online Shopping Pvt Ltd for Rs 40 Cr valuing the company at Rs 160 Cr.

This means it will put the valuation of the Mumbai-based company at `160 crore, nearly 2.3 times of its sales last year. Naaptol is founded by Manu Agarwal in 2008, it now registers 3,000 transactions a day and sells 500 brands.

This space has witnessed quite a lot of investments and qcquisitions, CompareIndia.com was acquired by Web18 in 2006. Another player in this space is Pricesbolo.com, a bangalore based startup. Canaan Partners invests in technology and healthcare companies. It has invested in e-commerce website Bharat Matrimony, Ceel Cast Asia holdings a  and entertainment website Chakpak Media.

It seems e-commerce portals have been catching attention from VC fraternity.

-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

MotorExchange as the name succinctly tells you what it is about, has raised undisclosed sum of capital from Canaan Parnters. Motorexchange is a platform for buyers and sellers to carry transactions of the used vehicles and target dealers.

MotorExchange has been founded by former Mahindra First Choice CEO Vinay Sanghi and ex-eBay India head Rajan Mehra. Sanghi is currently the CEO, and Mehra, currently a venture partner at Clearstone Venture Advisors, is the founder-director. Alok Mittal, general partner at Canaan, is joining the board of MotorExchange.

Motorexchange is targeting to capture significant market share of $15billion used car sale. Motorexchange has tied up with leading banks like ICICI and HDFC for easy finance.

-Hitesh, vcbytes.com