Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

HealthKart, gurgaon based online retailer has raised $5M from Sequoia Capital and Omidyar Network as part of series B round.  In April 2011 HealthKart had raised $1M from Kae Capital and Sequoia Capital.

Primarily the investments will be utilized in strengthening the product portfolio, supply chain system and good chunk of investments will be deployed in marketing.

Healthkart, is founded by two IIT-D graduates – Prashant Tandon and Sameer Maheshwari. They have able to bring in some talented entrepreneurs in their core team, for instance Animesh Jain is head of Online Marketing & Product, Animesh was CEO and Cofounder of iTasveer.

Healthkart which began as online health store has expanded its product portfolio, now it sells baby care, cosmetic products as well.

Lets have a look at their monthly traction:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	–	150K
Unique visitors (users)	–	69K
Page views	–	1M
Total visits	–	150K
Avg time on site	–	8:00

-Hitesh, vcBytes

Start up killers are those said statements that may lose the funding for the entrepreneur. When pitching to investors about the new product and business proposition, there is some moment when you know that you have lost your listener. One misspoken comment and everyone wants to leave as soon as possible. Lets look at few turn offs

No Competition

There is always competition. In some way customers are fulfilling their needs today. Competition can be as simple as continuing to do things as they are doing them today. Never ever say there is no competition. Investors look for proven and tested market which is growing. Investors may not be keen to invest in saturated markets like OTAs in India because they often require too much capital to overcome the incumbents, not because they are not viable.

Being Conservative

Majority of the Indian entrepreneurs i have met seem to believe that VCs want to hear that their numbers and estimates are conservative.  As an entrepreneur you should know Investors know that backing a start up is a very risky business, and conservative isn’t what they are interested in, nor is it what they expect.  There are plenty of conservative, less risky investment vehicles like Post Office schemes, MF available to investors.

Missing the Detailing

If you are entering entering into a market and not understanding the nuances of the business will cause failure. Do your homework and establish a process to get all the details and nitty-gritty of an industry and customer that make a product successful. For instance if you want to start an e-commerce company make sure you have detailed out all of flows/vendor relationship involved in it. Investors want to know the startup has experience in the market.

Break Through Technology

Seriously! as an entrepreneur if you say to investor you have developed a break through technology, then be prepared to say immediately why. Most investors will not believe you and it is generally considered as Myth.

Negative Attitude

Remember Investors invests on Entrepreneur and not on idea, they would like to see, assess entrepreneur attitude. So appear coach able, Every time an investor asks a question, they are impacting valuable information.  Not listening or addressing their concerns is a start-up killer. Becoming defensive when they ask questions is negative as well.

Disregard for Investor Money

Having an apparent disregard for the investors money will often sink a deal or make investors wary of what is to come of the startup in the future.  Recently i came across a pitch where two co-founders presented to angel investors and when one investor asked what if the start up encountered problems and hit the roadblock, they immediately replied they would just go back to their old jobs.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

SureWaves Mediatech, a Bangalore based startup operating in the digital media technology space has received Rs 10 Cr from India Innovation Fund (IIF) & Accel Partners. IIF is  It is IIF second investment

Founded in 2006 by Rajendra Khare, Tapan Kumar and Anant Kansal, Surewaves offers the ‘Surewaves media grid’, an integrated advertisement aggregation, content delivery, network management, media planning and reporting platform. SureWaves is also active in the Digital Display Networks business.

The product addresses the Spot TV market and enables geo-targeted advertisements on national and regional cable channels.

IIF is promoted by Nasscom and IKP Knowledge Park, IIF offers investee companies the benefit of topnotch mentoring with advisors such as S Ramadorai, TCS vicechairman , and Kiran Karnik, former president of IT trade body Nasscom, who are on the panel. Start-ups also have the opportunity to work jointly with the marquee companies who are backing the fund.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Snapdeal.com, the biggest deals & discount internet company in India has closed $40M as series B investment led by Bessemer Ventures and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and IndoUS Ventures also participated in this round. As per Kunal Bahl, Founder & CEO of Snapdeal this investment seems to be the largest Venture capital infusion in an internet company in a single round.

Interestingly Snapdeal has raised $12M in the month of January fron Nexus Venture Partners and IndoUS Ventures, thus total investment raised by Snapdeal has touched $52M. Earlier it was reported by Economic Times that Snapdeal is in talks with Bessemer Ventures and existing investors to raise 200Cr at 1000Cr Valuation.

Snapdeal claims to be adding 1.5M new users every month, their merchant base has crossed 30,000 and their deals and discount are available in over 50 cities in India. Snapdeal plans to expand its team and would like to take it upto 800 within this year.

Lets take a look at their monthly traction:

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	11M
Page views	34M
Total visits	18M
Avg time on site	3:20

Couple of months back Snapdeal introduced voucher of phone service. The new service allows users of snapdeal to avail deals bought from the website without having to carry a print out of the deal. The transaction is carried out through the SMS message that the customer gets on the registered mobile number after buying a deal. This initiative has given good results to the company catering to the 30% of its user base which access deals on their mobile.

In June 2010 Snapdeal has acquired Bangalore based deal startup Grabbon.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

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

Fidelity Growth Partners India (FGPI) invests up to $15M to acquire a significant minority stake in Mind Shaper Technologies Private Limited. Branded as Classteacher Learning Systems, the company is a pioneer in K-12 educational content in the country.

The investment will be used to enhance the company’s current product portfolio and broaden its offering for new technology like tablets in classrooms. Classteacher offers an integrated solution to assist teaching in classrooms using software, hardware and school support services. At present the company has one of the largest repositories of digital education content in the industry with about 85,000 teaching modules mapped to multiple education boards.

As part of this investment Mr. Kabir Narang and Mr. Raul Rai with FIL Capital Advisors (India), the private equity advisory arm for FGPI will join the board of the company. Commenting on this, Kabir Narang said, “We are excited to partner with Mind Shaper Technologies and be a part of the large and growing education sector. The company has an exhaustive content library that can be leveraged beyond digital whiteboards, a reference base of leading schools across the country and a strong management team”.

Mr. Rohit Pande, CEO, Classteacher Learning Systems, said “This investment will help us enhance our product offering as well as expand into new segments of education. We see this as a key milestone in our evolution and are glad to partner with FGPI to achieve our goal to support learning in classrooms across India.”

About Fidelity Growth Partners India:

Fidelity Growth Partners India (FGPI) is the India-focused private equity arm of Fidelity International, focused on cross-sector growth capital investing. FGPI seeks to invest in high-quality, high-growth companies in India across a broad range of sectors with typical investment sizes ranging from $10 million to $50 million. FGPI is committed to making the companies it invests in leaders in their industries through access to patient capital with a long term investment mindset, a powerful network of resources and a team of investment professionals with a proven track record of success. FGPI’s investments include Coastal Projects, Manthan Systems, NetMagic Solutions, PL Engineering, Shreem Electric, Transpole Logistics and VMC Systems.

About Classteacher Learning Systems:

Classteacher Learning Systems is a pioneer in educational content in the country with over 85,000 modules, 500 schools and 0.5 million students. Classteacher offers an integrated solution to assist teaching in classrooms using software, hardware and school support services.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

ThePrivateSales.com a flash sale site promoted by Bangalore based TPS shopping Outlet Pvt Ltd has raised $5M from a private company. ThePrivateSales was founded in mid 2010 by Sunder and Sajan Gianchandani as a flash sales website offering high-end products by Indian and global fashion labels.

Investments will primarily used in adding more brands in the inventory and also increase man power and open offices and warehouses across all the metros. Good part of Investment will go into brand building and marketing,ThePrivateSales plans to invest heavily on online and viral marketing, they would spend nearly 1Crore on it.

Unlike FashionandYou, Theprivatesales deals with high end designer labels like Versace, Renata Riggi etc. Since founders have vast experience in fashion industry they are leveraging their experience in striking fantastic deals. I personally like the categorization of products at ThePrivateSales.com, easy to find products, and like FashionandYou where all brands of a particular category are placed in one webpage. Discounts offered by ThePrivateSales are pretty good compared to other flash sale sites.

ThePrivateSales.com claims to have above 4L registered users, their monthly sales are growing at 50-60%. Major competitors in this space are – 99Labels.com, Bagittoday, Fashionandyou.com, Exclusively.in

Lets have a look at ThePrivateSales monthly traction -

ThePrivateSales.com has healthy traction, and with investments coming in its all poised to go upwards.

-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

BabyOye, an e-commerce startup in babycare products has raised $2.5M from Accel partners and Tiger Global. Primarily investments will be utilized in hiring people, expand its supply chain, build warehouses and increase product range.

BabyOye started by husband-wife duo – Arunima Singhdeo and Sanjay Nadkarni, an ex Infoedge executive who understands Indian online space quite well. Babyoye has tied-up with over 80 brands and offers a range of over 4,000 products, including Pampers diapers, Chicco food, Johnson’s skincare range. BabyOye certainly wants to make a mark in this multi billion dollar market.

BabyOye also offers products for new moms, making it an shopping platform for both new born babies and new mom.

Its been barely 6months they started BabyOye and managed to raise handsome series A funding from reputed VCs is just unbelievable. One of the main competitor for BabyOye is Coimbatore based Hushbabies.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Groffr, the only group buying portal of high value items like real estate, cars, home loans etc is about to close a funding round. It is learnt that the group buying space seems to be only gaining momentum. We have learnt that Groffr is about to raise capital from a prominent Angel Network and another institutional fund. The details are not known but sources say it’s close to a million dollar. The funds are largely going to be used for expansion purposes. Since this is not from company sources we can’t confirm it with certainty.

In another development Groffr got an offer for one of the biggest internet company in India for a complete buy out which was in tune of $4-5M. Groffr founders Sandeep Reddy and Vikhyat Srivastava  declined this tempting offer, Certainly they want to play bigger game in this $1B real estate brokerage market.

Transactions over Groffr platform has been very healthy, around 115 crores transaction has been done and they have saved around 21Cr for their customers. Groffr monthly net revenue has been growing steadily.

Groffr is a a year old Mumbai based startup founded by Vikhyat Srivastav and Sandeep Reddy, both IIMK graduate and worked earlier with PE real estate funds. The group aggregates people interested in a particular property and negotiates with the developers for a discounted price for everyone. Groffr employs 20 people in three cities – Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Given the recent volatility in the sector, it makes sense for the real estate developers and car dealers also as they are able to sell a good chunk of their high value inventory in one shot. It’s a win-win situation for both the parties. Buyers get a good bargain while developers are able to sell a lot of flats in one go while saving on marketing cost.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com