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