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

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