Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

JustDial, India’s biggest local search engine has deferred its plan to go public and have gone ahead and raised Rs 327 Crore from SAP Ventures and existing investor Sequoia Capital which led this round with investment of Rs 305Cr, its largest investment in India.

Justdial promoters and employees owns 40% of equity in the company while rest 60% lies with investors which include Tiger Global, Saif partners

Founded in 1996 with an mere investment of Rs 50,000, Just Dial is India’s bestknown local search provider and considered as backbone in the SME segment.

Just Dial, which delivers services across the Web, phone and mobile Internet, has a database of about 7.8 million merchant listings, with over 12 million merchant ratings and reviews. Currently 60% of queries originate from internet and mobile, though it started as telephone based service.

Justdial plans to file a DRHP next month and is planning to go public in 2013 and primarily it will be a  liquidity event for their  investors. Just Dial had a total income of Rs. 189.9 crore in fiscal 2011, up 41% over the previous year while the company’s profit after tax rose 55.3% to Rs. 28.62 crore, according to the DRHP filing.

Lets look at their monthly web traction:-

Unique visitors	7.4M
Unique visitors	3.5M
Reach	0.2%
Page views	31M
Total visits	7.5M
Avg visits per cookie	1
Avg time on site	7:10

The local search/information engine space in India has generated strong interest among investors. Last month, Quikr raised $32 million in its fifth and largest round of fund raising.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Makemytrip makes a debut in NASDQQ and what a dream run for MMT in the 1st day of listing.  To be sure, the deal was modest – the company sold just $70 million worth of stock, selling 5 million shares at $14 apiece.

Upon listing India’s biggest online travel company surged as much as $10.35 to $24.35 thus making a MakeMyTrip’s stock price jumped 89 percent in the first day of trading. That’s the biggest first-day jump for any U.S. stock since 2007. So seems to be good time ahead for India Companies and MMT certainly leading the way and giving cue to other indian tech companies. Good times ahead for MMT and it reflects in their home page, a snapshot attached below

What is the best way for VC to exit a portfolio company? Undoubtedly it is listing in a Stock Exchange. Indeed good times for investors like SAIF, Helion Venture capital, Seirra Ventures who invested in MMT, returns are staggering.

But someone out is here to spoil their party and i must say what a time to act. The promoters of Cox & Kings, one of the oldest travel companies in the world, have filed a criminal case against Makemytrip. According to Cox & Kings which owns Ezeego1, between 2007 and 2008 the Makemytrip management created the similar looking URLs to deceive customers and eventually lead them to their own site.

Isn’t it an interesting twist in this IPO.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

NetCore Solutions has acquired  web portal OneIndia and online classifieds portal Click, both are properties of Greynium Information Technologies.   NetCore’s founder and managing director, Rajesh Jain, had earlier invested in Greynium through his personal venture capital fund Emergic Venture Capital. However the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Interestingly both the portals have good traction which would have been a driving force behind this acquisition.

Monthly traction at OneIndia

Worldwide Unique visitors (cookies) 7.3M Unique visitors (users) 3.5M Reach 0.2% Page views 62M Total visits 12M Avg visits per visitor 2.2 Avg time on site 6:00

3.5M unique visitiors is pretty good and more importantly average time on site is 6mins which means they have sticky content keeping users engaged. With 7.3M they must be minting atleast 8-10Lacs from the Advertising.

Monthly traction at Click.in

Worldwide
Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	350K
Unique visitors (users)	430K
Reach	0.0%
Page views	2.6M
Total visits	510K
Avg visits per visitor	1.2
Avg time on site	6:20

In the current scenarios portal having good traction has various options to monetize. Earlier I have covered How Traction can lead it to IPO, check out here.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Can you believe sites like 123Greetings can go public, its just simple flash based e-cards service provider with an inventory of 20k cards. I have used their service during my college days and you would have send cards to your friends via 123Greetings.  I was in  a impression that 123Greetings is US based portal and was excited and surprised to find its a product of Kolkotta based Intrasoft technologies. Its been in operation since 13 years

Let’s dig into the reasons which propelled 123Greetings IPO-  Its revenue depends only on online advertising. Currently, 65% revenue and 60% online traffic come from the US while the rest is from India, Its US #2 greeting site as well. Have a look at their monthly traction -

This is some mind blowing  statistics!!

According to its prospectus filed with the market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India, Intrasoft posted revenue of Rs21.38 crore and profit of Rs5.3 crore in the last fiscal. At the lower end of its price band of Rs137-145 per share, Intrasoft hopes to raise roughly Rs50 crore from the issue.

The firm’s market capitalization will thus hover around Rs200 crore—eight times its revenue for the past year, and nearly five times more than the net worth of the firm, which stood at Rs37.6 crore on 30 September 2009.

So moral of the story – company can go public if you are making money solely coming from advertisers

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com