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

FirstCry, a pune based online retailer for kids and babycare products has raised investments of $4M from SAIF Partners. The investments will be utilized in scaling up the operations, setting up the engineering team and warehouses for speedy delivery of products.

FirstCry is run by BrainBees Solutions Pvt Ltd and is founded by Sunil Maheshwari and Amitava Saha. Sunil is a serial entrepreneur and had earlier co-founded Brainvisa Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which was sold to Indecomm Global Services in 2007. Brainvisa had raised $5M from Sequoia Capital.

FirstCry has tied-up with over 100 brands like Mattel, Funskool, Hotwheels, Disney , Barbie, Zapak and offers a range of over 4,000 products including Pampers diapers, Johnson’s skincare range and cycle maker BSA’s prams and strollers. FirstCry aims to cover the complete gammut of parenting – from clothings for new mothers, babycare products and toys for little grown up kids.

Currently, it does 200 transactions a day. The portal has plans to expand to newer markets in Asia like Srilanka, Indonesia and Malaysia. As per Sunil the market size is very large – it is a $5 billion opportunity, and  growing very fast in  tier 2 and 3 cities. Around 35% of FirstCry orders come from towns and the demand is huge, considering the lack of options, access and range. It is a prime market for e-commerce firms.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Inkfruit, an online apparel retailer has raised $3M in series A round from SAIF Partners. The amount raised will be used to expand its product offering and to expand its retail outlets.

Founded in 2007 by IITians- Kashyap Dalal and Navneet Rai, Inkfruit.com is an community-centered online apparel store which allows buyers to design their own T-shirts, mugs and posters with the help of artists.

At Inkfurit, t-shirt designs are submitted and voted for by a community. The design that receives most votes ‘wins’, gets printed and is put for sale. The member whose design is selected gets paid a winning amount.

Inkfruit essentially follows Threadless model in India which is understood to be a billion-dollar, Inkfruit directly competes with companies like iLogo, Scopial in India. After successful IPO of MakeMyTrip, SAIF partners is highly bullish on Internet ventures, though $3M is relatively small investment for them but they are supporting the vision of the company.

SAIF Partners has about $4 billion of assets under management has invested  $20 million in  Catmoss Retail Ltd,  $25 million in Network 18 Media &Investments Ltd,  $10 million in Amoha Education Pvt. Ltd, TV 18 Home shopping network Ltd and $115 million in National Stock Exchange of India among other investments.

Lets look at the monthly traction at Inkfruit-: