Mumbai-based Citrus Payment Solutions, an online checkout and payment solutions startup, is announcing the raising of a $2 million Series A round of funding from Sequoia Capital. The funds will be deployed in product development and growing the development team. Citrus was founded in 2011 by Satyen Kothari and Jitendra Gupta. Kothari has spent the [...]
What is Sequoia smoking? That’s what we thought when we walked into a Faaso’s outlet in suburban Mumbai the other day. With barely five small tables, drab interiors and a counter and kitchen which service orders, you won’t spend a lot of time at the eatery. But last October, the Pune-based fast food company, which [...]
Tridibesh Satpathy bootstrapped his education training and certification company Edusys for seven years before reaching out to venture capitalists for funding. The Bangalore-based company raised $7.5 million from Sequoia Capital today, which it plans to use to launch new products, expand into larger market segments and strengthen its senior management team. Sequoia classifies the investment [...]
Why India’s biggest VC investor is seeking out and nurturing seed stage startups Sabahat Azim, founder and CEO of Glocal Healthcare, spends most of his waking hours in Sonamukhi, a small town in West Bengal, about 126 kilometers from Kolkata. Sonamukhi is the site for his 18-month old company’s first hospital for non-urban consumers. A [...]
Gurgaon-based cloud telephony solutions startups Knowlarity Communications has raised a $6.75 million round of funding from Sequoia Capital. This appears to be the company’s first round of venture capital funding. The money will be used to strengthen research and development activities and expand marketing operations. The company also plans to extend its presence to other [...]
Gurgaon-based online health store HealthKart has raised $5.2 million (Rs 27 crore) as part of a Series A round of funding from Sequoia Capital and Omidyar Networks, reports VCCircle. The company had earlier raised over $1 million from KAE Capital and Sequoia in seed funds. Founded in March 2011, the startup was reportedly in the [...]
Update: SKS Microfinance today announced Rs 850-Rs 985 per share as the price band for its upcoming IPO, which opens on Wednesday — read the Bloomberg report. At the upper price band, it can expect to raise as much as Rs 1.65 crore (about $344 million) says the report. VCCircle reports that Sequoia Capital could [...]
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 [...]
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