Just four early stage deals in August. Are we into the holiday season already? My Deal of the Month is Noida-based e-waste management startup Attero which picked up $6.3 million from DFJ and NEA-IndoUS Ventures — the company recycles electrical and electronic equipment such as mobile phones, computers, televisions and so on. It is the first company of its kind in India and you can’t help but like a company that exists to make your world cleaner. Here’s the August deal line-up:
NSRCEL incubated Mango Technologies, a Bangalore-based startup that makes application software for low-cost mobile phones, received undisclosed funding from Ojas Venture Partners. Founders Sunil Maheshwari and Lekh Joshi are telecom industry veterans with varied experience in companies such as Motorola, Reliance Infocomm and Quasar Innovations.
Lifeblob, a ‘next generation’ social networking startup based in Mumbai, received $1 million from Seedfund. There’s been some discussion on next generation social networking companies on this blog — read an earlier post and Norwest Venture Partners‘ India chief Niren Shah’s take on the space here.
Hyderabad-based Apalya Technologies, a mobile entertainment company founded in 2005, raised $500,000 from Mumbai Angels.
Bangalore-based online DVD rental company Seventymm (which took three days to deliver an innocuous Bengali movie to me), raised $11.4 million in Series C funding from NEA-IndoUS Ventures and returning investors Matrix Partners India, DFJ and ePlanet Ventures. That takes the total venture money raised so far to a little over $21 million. This is one startup that is going to need lots more money and very patient investors. Reliance ADA’s BIGFlix and Nimbus’ Showtime are making some serious noise in the market with their online-offline model. My personal favourite is BIGFlix, which does need to improve its stock, because of the superb service. Money is obviously not a constraint for either Nimbus or Reliance ADA and Seventymm faces some tough challenges. Read Medianama’s take on what Seventymm could do or should do to beat the competition.
Venture Investors, Non Venture Investments
Three venture capital investors did three rather non-venture kind of deals. Matrix Partners India invested $7 million in pre-school educator Treehouse Education, Helion Venture Partners put $4 million in HummingBird Suites, a service apartments operator, and NEA-IndoUS Ventures invested $2 million in accounting services firm Basiz Fund Services, which is a subsidiary of BSE-listed Vishal Information Technologies. Treehouse owns 45 pre-schools across the country and follows the non-franchisee model, unlike larger competitors. HummingBird is a Bangalore-based company which currently operates 900 rooms at present. Basiz is based in Chennai and caters to mutual funds, hedge and private equity funds.
Investment Snap 2008
- $ 157 million invested between January and August
- 25 companies received funding across multiple stages
Data Source: Grant Thornton India & Media Reports
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Interesting to watch seventymm.com raising Series C round of funding. I could not recall any Indian company based in India raising Series C round of funding of 10+ million dollars.
This certainly is a positive sign. I am just wondering that as Reliance is also there with BigFlix and definitely not backed by VC funding but some real good money, Seventymm.com must be having some cool business models and strategy to bring this giant to their knees.
Overall, its a great sign for India! Cheers.