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

Quikr, an online classified site headquartered in Mumbai raises $32M led by PE firm Warburg Pincus.  This round was a series E round and earlier Quikr had raised investments from Omdiyar Networks, Norwest Ventures, Matrix Partners and eBay. Existing investors also participated in this round. Nitin Nayar, Managing Director of Warburg Pincus comes on the board of Quikr.

It was launched as Kijiji.in on eBay global classified platform and was renamed as Quikr in late 2008. Quikr is currently present in over 40 cities across India.

Quikr provides the local community with a platform to help them buy, sell, rent and find something and address needs across many categories. These categories range from Mobiles, real estate, cars, services, jobs, entertainment, furniture, electronics etc. The company is also exploring the potential of introducing other categories like financial services.

Quikr monetizes from placement of ads in its section, Premium advertisements increase the ad visibility and help reach out to more consumers. The price for these ads varies according to the category of the product or service.

Lets look at the monthly web traction at Quikr :

Worldwide Unique visitors (estimated cookies) 140K 11M Unique visitors (users) 47K 5M Page views 420K 45M Total visits 120K 11M Avg visits per cookie 0.91 1 Avg time on site 4:00 5:20

Seeing the web traction, Quikr money spent on online advertisement and TVC is paying off

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Quikr, India’s leading horizontal classifieds player, has raised $6 million in series C funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), and returning investors, Omidyar Network, Matrix Partners India and eBay Inc. With this round of financing, Quikr has raised in excess of Rs 50 crore since inception. Norwest Venture Partners, which led the round, has invested about $4 million.

Quikr offers a web-based classifieds platform that addresses the needs of local communities in 40 cities across India. More than 8 million consumers visit Quikr every month to buy, sell, rent or find things.

Above figure compares the traction at Quickr, Sulekha and ClickIndia.

Interestingly NVP is an existing investor in Sulekha, another classified portal. Local classifieds portals are becoming hot favorites for investors. Earlier Helion invested in GETIT, Sequoia capital raised their equity in Justdial and NVP invested in OLX.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com