Delhi-based digital advertising agency Webchutney has a new owner in Dentsu India Group, the 100 per cent subsidiary of Tokyo-headquartered media company Dentsu. It has acquired an 80 per cent stake in the company, picking up 70.06 per cent from Network18 Media & Investments, said media reports. The financial details of the transaction have not [...]
Rediff has sold its stake in Adnear (previously known as Imere), a location based company in which it had bought a minority stake in 2009, for $1.14 million, Rediff.com has disclosed. In November 2012, AdNear had raised Rs 35 crore (around $6.2 million at current levels) from Sequoia Capital India and Canaan Partners. AdNear offers [...]
Jaipur-based Intap Labs, which runs online language learning platform CultureAlley, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding from KAE Capital, the Mumbai-based early stage investor, reports Mint. The firm has picked up a minority stake in the company, said the report. Founded in 2012 by Nishant Patni and Pranshu Bhandari, CultureAlley uses live videos for [...]
Mumbai-based local search firm Just Dial’s initial public offering (IPO) sailed through yesterday, with the issue being oversubscribed 11.63 times by institutional and retail investors, according to NSE data. The company received bids for more than 157 million shares (157,754,675 shares) against the total offer size of more than 13 million shares (13,560,533 shares). The [...]
We’re into the third and last day of the Just Dial initial public offering and so far it’s going okay. The company is in the market to raise a targeted Rs 950 crore ($174 million) and is diluting 25.02 percent of the fully-diluted post-offer paid-up equity capital of the company. Yesterday, on Day 2 of [...]
Ending speculation from last week, Internet company Yahoo! is announcing that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire short-form blogging platform Tumblr. The acquisition is being undertaken at a total consideration of approximately $1.1 billion, substantially all of which will be payable in cash, the Sunnyvale, California-headquartered company said in a press release. The [...]
Gurgaon-based Hector Beverages, which retails the energy drink brand Tzinga, has raised a $8 million in a second round of funding led by Sequoia Capital India. Existing investors Catamaran Ventures and Footprint Ventures have also participated in the round. The company had reportedly raised a Rs 6 crore (a little over $1 million) first round [...]
Mumbai-based Heckyl Technologies is one of those startups that likes to fly below the radar, all the while steadily building the blocks for a solid business. And the results seem to be showing. In the past 15-odd months, since it raised a $1 million seed round of funding from Seedfund, the company has been busy [...]
Seedfund-backed Technium Labs, which runs LurnQ, unified and open online learning platform for learners and teachers, is in the market to raise a $5 million Series A round of funding. The Mumbai-based startup, which models itself on Github (a collaborative platform for software developers), has been piloting an enterprise feature since April and is in [...]
Seed fund and startup accelerator 500 Startups has just announced its latest accelerator batch and the list includes five Indian startups — Credii, PriceBaba, School Admissions, Tushky and Seat 14A. That’s one more than the number of Indian startups that made it to the November batch. This is the Mountain View, California-headquartered accelerator’s sixth batch [...]
Accelerator to angel to VC flow still struggling to find equilibrium in India
I had fun moderating the panel on early stage financing at India Internet Day. VCCircle has an interesting article. The key issues are as under: 1. Too few deals are progressing from accelerators to angel, and from angel to Series A. Only five per cent of deals going from accelerators to Series A might not [...]
The early ecommerce marketplace pioneers: eBay class of 2000-2005
TechCrunch recently published an article I wrote about how the eBay class of 2000-2005 helped shape ecommerce in Silicon Valley and continues to innovate and move the sector forward. By understanding what shaped this class’ experience and examining where these alums are today, we identified the most important industry trends and start to see a [...]
The founder’s guide to surviving the Series A crunch
The Indian entrepreneurship and venture capital ecosystem is fast maturing. Today we have more early stage funds than ever. This fund availability will only improve, aside from the temporary blips caused due to macroeconomic ups and downs. We are in one such ‘crunch’ today, where even though seed and angel funds are writing cheques with [...]
Connect