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

Letsbuy, a New Delhi based e-commerce company founded by Hitesh Dhingra and Amanpreet Bajaj  in mid 2009 has raised an investment of $6M in series A round from Helion Venture Partners, Accel Partners and Tiger Global.

LetsBuy.com is an online retailer of consumer electronics, telecommunication products, laptops and computers peripherals, they deliver goods through out India. Earlier Hitesh Dhingra was the co-founder and Business Head of online advertising firm Quasar Media Pvt Ltd and Tyroo Media.

“LetsBuy.com in on the fast-growth path and the VC funding from the leaders in the space will only spur us on. The funds would be deployed in strengthening customer service, technology and supply chain processes,” said Dhingra, Founder & CEO, LetsBuy.com.

“India has witnessed tremendous growth in e-commerce and Letsbuy has been part of that growth. The team has the vision to have identified a very compelling opportunity and the execution skills to deliver to it,” said Ashish Gupta, Managing Director, Helion Venture Partners.

“The LetsBuy.com team has the vision and the business acumen to identify opportunities and make them stepping stones towards growth. In the process they present the best offerings to their customers and meet the goals chalked out by the partner investors. The strategy and plans match those valued by the Accel Partners team,” said Prashanth Prakash, Partner, Accel Partners.

If you compare the online traction of Infibeam, Futurebazaar and Letsbuy, letsbuy is catching up with Futurebazaar

Interestingly Letsbuy compete with Flipkart (also a portfolio company of tiger global and Accel Partners) in category like ‘Mobiles’.

I am impressed with wide range of payment options available for users at Letsbuy for order fulfillment, except for payment through mobile they have covered everything -

e-commerce space in India is very big enough to sustain and grow multiple payers. Online retailer with superior customer service, competitive pricing and quick delivery time will be successful.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Flipkart, India’s largest online bookstore today announced that it has acquired weRead, the largest social network based book recommendation and review platform. Though the acquisition amount wasn’t disclosed.

The weRead acquisition allows Flipkart to leverage advanced recommendation technologies and social graph information to enhance customer experience. With more than 3 million readers and 60 million books, weRead captures user-generated information such as who, within your social network, has marked a book as a favourite, detailed reviews and user ratings of books.

The weRead application is available across all popular social network sites such as Facebook, Orkut, Yahoo, MySpace and Hi5. Considering that purchase of books, as a category, is driven by reviews and recommendations, weRead provides an edge as it would immediately showcase community verdicts on any book.

The weRead component will make buying online at Flipkart a heightened social experience. Owing to its community-driven, independent nature, weRead will retain its own brand identity, even after the purchase by Flipkart.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Booksvilla is a startup which is joining the crowded online bookstore space. Booksvilla is founded by Chirag Rathod and Rohan Pimparkar, both students of Entrepreneurship Development Centre at Mudra Institute Communications. Both are voracious readers and very passionate about books which propelled them to develop an ecommerce site on books which will improve browsing and shopping experience.

Booksvilla has put up books 90+ categories ranging from acting to tarot, search feature is implemented well. Though prices are not very competitive when compared to flipkart.

Besides selling new books Booksvilla offers a unique, first-of-its-kind online book exchange program through its portal. The website enables its users to put up a list of books they own and also put up a wish list of books they would like to read and thus facilitates a barter system amongst its users by registering online.

After a good deal of research they realized that there was no such platform for online exchange of books and started working on this idea which became an entrepreneurial reality after putting in a lot of hard work for over a year. Cost is one of the critical factor for Indian consumers when it comes to buying any commodity, it also solidified their decision for exchange platform.

This program will indirectly also reduce piracy since the program focuses on exchanging original copies of the books.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Exclusively.in, a periodic sale portal offering high end products – designer wear, home decor, fashion accessories has raised $2.8 million in funding from Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners.

Exclusively.in caters to NRI audience in US which doesn’t mind shelling premium for the right product not available in US. Their working model is quite simple, products are source from India mainly around NCR region and then products are shipped to users based out of US. Soon they plan to start shipments to countries like UK and Canada.

Exclusively.in deals in desginer products and accessories like jewelry, handbags, shawls, desginer sarees, handicrafts, paintings and is planning to expand to verticals like travel. Sunjay Guleria is CEO and co-founder and Sonny Caberwal is COO and cofounder of this startup which was launched in june. Exclusively.in operates from two offices – New Delhi and New York.

At a first glance i felt product pricing is quite steep but may be for an NRI it isn’t much, user has to pay an additional charge of around $40 for the shipment.

Accel India has been bullish on e-commerce players and this strategy has paid off well, their investments in Flipkart and Myntra are sure to give them hefty returns, Helion has been backing internet ventures and with recent listing of MMT and their investments in Redbus they doesn’t want to miss emerging opportunities in Internet space.

It will be interesting to see if Fashionandyou plans to cater to NRI audience in near future and pose a competition for Exclusively.in

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Its been quite sometime i have bought books from offline stores since i generally don’t browse the bookshelf and buy books, i know which books i need to buy and i order it through online bookstores since its quite convenient and they offer decent discount. Before ordering i check the pricing and availability across all of them, and this process is certainly tedious and time consuming.

Indiabookstore is here to address the need of a average buyer like me,  Indiabookstore enables user to check the pricing of book, availability of book, days to deliver the book across various online bookstores. 

Indiabookstore is one of the first online book shopping aggregator to hit the market. Its a hobby project stated by Animesh Jain, founder of iTasveer and it is generating good traction.

This meta book search compares online bookportals at a time and It pulls textual data through its servers while images are fetched from the online stores at the client’s end which increases the speed of searching. I searched for Chetan Bhagat’s ’2 States’ and here is the result set -

UI is simple, clutter free and quite user friendly. Search speed is amazingly quite good and user doesn’t encounter any lag. Search results are based on relevance and ISBN. Indiabookstore supports 8 online bookstores and via affiliate programs Indiabookstore generates revenue.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

if you are avid book reader, love buying books and always look out at best price here is a web utility which will further enhance your buying experience.

Mysmartprice is a book comparison utility and it compares the price and availability across well known online book portals like Flipkart and Infibeam in India. In short its an aggregator.

Mysmartprice UI is simple and easy to use, their auto suggest works pretty well. I searched for book title “Devil” in Pinstripes” and here is the result page -

As per result page i find the best price from Infibeam, One column missing in their result page is “Availability” against the respective online stores, it may cause disappointment if as a user clicks on “Buy Now” on the cheapest price offered by bookstore and find out its not available.

Not sure of their exact business model but one obvious way of monetizing is through affiliate programs run by mostly all the prominent online bookstores. Do check out Mysmartprice and share your feedback.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Flipkart has raised its second round of venture funding from New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management. Sources familiar with the development told VCCircle that the new round of funding was closed a few months back and is believed to be in the tune of $8 million to $10 million. Flipkart earlier raised funding early venture capital firm Accel India.

This development comes as Flipkart has expanded from being an online book retailer to offering products in movies, games and music. It also plans to launch sale of software like Norton Anti-virus, Adobe, Windows, and others. Indian CD/DVD market was worth approximately Rs 10 billion in 2008 and is expected to grow to Rs 16 billion by 2013 at an yearly growth rate of 10 to 15%, said Flipkart.

Flipkart currently has over 6 million titles listed ranging across all categories. The Bangalore-based company is targeting revenues of Rs 100 crore by March 2011, said a  recent release. The funding from Tiger Global, which has backed companies like local search firm Just Dial and coaching institute T.I.M.E, will help in this expansion. The new round of funding for Flipkart had attracted several venture capital firms, said a source.

Flipkart had revenue of Rs 25 crore in 2009-10, Flipkart said in an interview to CNBC-TV18 recently. It was set up in 2007 by IIT Delhi classmates Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, who later worked at Amazon before starting Flipkart. The company has a team of 200 members and currently operates from offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi.

Flipkart, leader in online bookstore has inspired many entrepreneurs to plunge into this space and companies like Popabook, Lebooks, Simplybooks have put in effort in developing the portal and establishing the business and operational logistics.

Bookwaale is one company which is trying to do something related to book, they are very smartly imitating Flipkart in terms of look and feel of the homepage. I took couple of seconds to realize its not flipkart. Here is the snapshot of Bookwaale -

Interestingly if you search bookwaale, you see the 1st result points to globalshiksha. Is it globalshiksha portal or they promoting it by cross linkging, something fishy i must say.

In my view Bookwaale is up for grabs, some smart jack plans to make quick bucks by enticing potential buyer  by developing oops copying the web framework of flipkart.

Good programmer innovate and smart programmer copy and paste

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Foostor is an e-commerce portal developed by eYantra which marks its foray into the B2C segment, eYantra is a B2B player in merchandising, stationary and corporate gifting and recently it closed a funding of $7.5M covered here.

I have a pretty bad experience while buying products from Rediff, products were of bad quality and what they display and what you get is very different and i have almost given up buying products online.

I generally buy books online from online bookstores like flipkart, simplybooks, lebooks. After long time i bought few stuffs from foostor. I like the overall experience –  pretty simply and neat UI,  checkout process is quite easy – new user doesn’t have to signup they can directly checkout by giving shipping address, payment gateway integration done quite well.

Product categories include mobiles, memory disks, kids toys, ladies apparel, mp3 players, perfumes. If they need to evolve into a complete B2C ecommerce portal they should expand their product category and at present seem to be focusing on woman related products.

Foostor also allows merchants to showcase their product catalog and items like ebay shops, you can find fernsnpetals displaying their stuff with respective categories.

Best part was getting a confirmation call from Foostor sales team within 20 secs of placing the order.

Let’s analyse monthly traction at Foostor:

• World wide Alexa Traffic Rank: 56,341
• Traffic Rank in IN: 7,029

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Unique visitors (estimated cookies) 76K Unique visitors (users) 93K     Page views 900K Total visits 110K Avg visits per visitor 1.2 Avg time on site 9:50

Quite impressive hits and pageviews numbers achieved within 5 months of its launch.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com