YourNest Angel Fund closes second deal with Mycity4kids
Delhi-based Mycity4kids, a listings and ecommerce site for services and products for children, has raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from angel and early stage investor YourNest Angel Fund. Just4Kids Services, the company that owns the Mycity4kids brand, will use the capital raised to launch its services in Mumbai and Bangalore next month and expand to five more cities by the end of the year. YourNest typically invests between Rs 3 crore and Rs 5 crore (or less than $1 million) in a company.
Mycity4kids is the latest in a series of kids-related online businesses that have attracted venture capital in India since last January (see table). In February this year, IDG Ventures India and SAIF Partners invested $14 million as part of a Series B round in Pune-based BrainBees Solutions, which owns online baby products store Firstcry. This followed a $4 million Series A round that BrainBees had raised from SAIF last year. More recently, Bangalore-based Appcity Software Technologies, which runs online kidswear store Unamia, and Delhi-based Lapis Marketing Services, which own baby care products e-store HushBabies, raised undisclosed amounts from investors.
Founded by former Aviva Life Insurance executives Vishal Gupta and Prashant Sinha, and Asif Mohammed, founder of a startup called Aada IT Solutions, Mycity4kids claims 150,000 visitors per month from the National Capital Region, where it currently operates. “About 30 per cent of the traffic is repeat visitors,” said Gupta, speaking to StartupCentral from Delhi. Prior to the YourNest funding, the three founders bootstrapped the venture, investing about Rs 50 lakh from their combined resources, he said.
The site offers parents of young children information on 70-odd varieties of services such as playschools, tuitions and day care, hobby activity centers, party planners, sports activity centers and summer camps. Businesses that offer such services can list themselves on the site, manage leads and responses and collect payments online or via cash-on-delivery. In return, Mysite4kids charges these businesses a fixed fee. Schools have to pay Rs 60,000, playschools are charged Rs 45,000 and other service providers are charged Rs 25,000. At present, the site has 110 businesses using this service.
In addition, the company also generates revenues from commissions on ecommerce transactions done through its site. “We’re currently doing about 500 transactions per month,” said Gupta. Advertising on the site constitutes a small portion of revenues. The company expects the funds raised from YourNest to keep it capitalized for the next 12 months.
Noida-based YourNest, led by Sunil Goyal, Sanjay Pande and Girish Shivani, launched operations last year with a Rs 100 crore (about $18 million) corpus. It announced its first investment in March with a $1 million investment in Noida-based video analytics startups Proof of Performance Data Services.
Image Courtesy: Mycity4kids
