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BigshoeBazaar, an online wholesaler and retailer of shoes, apparels etc has closed its series B round of investment of $9M from Narayanmurthy floated Catamaran Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. The deal was almost done after BigshoeBazaar raised its series A investment.

With this new investment Catamaran Ventures has picked up 13 per cent stake in the online firm for Rs 26 crore, Nexus Venture Partners has picked up 7 per cent stake for Rs 14 crore. The funds will be used to strengthen supply chain and setting up warehouses to support growth at the front-end,” Bigshoebazaar India Co-founder Manmohan Agarwal said.

BigshoeBazaar primarily runs a B2C portal Yebhi.com formerly known as Bigshoebazaar.com which sell footwear mainly and now it has added few more categories like Clothing, jewellery. Yebhi.com does around 4000 transactions on a daily basis. Bigshoebazaar runs a wholesale network across the country targeted at small retailers in Tier2 and Tier3 cities to source Global brands like Adidas, Nike etc. which in general don’t have access to such brands. Bigshoebazaar has also started franchisee business, where it offers shoe retailers to use it brand and retailers source the footwear from the company.

You may check out Nitin Agarwal’s interview here, Nitin is one of the Cofounder of BigShoeBazaar.

Lets look at the monthly traction at Yebhi.com:

Worldwide
Unique visitors	840K
Page views	9M
Total visits	1.2M
Avg time on site	8:50

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

SKS Microfinance which gives small loans to poor borrowers, founded by Vikram Akula is coming out with Initial Public Offering (IPO) of 16.8m shares with a fixed price band at 850-985 rupees/share. Thus SKS microfinance is all set to raise $353M from the IPO process.

SKS Microfinance is India’s biggest microfinance institution with a loan book of Rs. 4300 thousand Crores is well funded by  Sequoia Capital, Kismet Capital, Unitus, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Catamaran.

SKS Microfinance plans to use the share sale proceeds to augment its capital base to meet future capital requirements that is likely to be fuelled by growth in the business, the company said in its offering prospectus.

Vikram Akula, the founder and the chairperson, who owns 3.8 per cent in the company as employee stock options, said he had sold 25 per cent of his stake to a private equity firm.

Sequoia is going to make around 15-18x returns from its investments and Catamaran has also hit the jackpot with their first investee company going public.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com