Myntra, founded in 2008 as an online platform for personalized gifting products, raised a $14 million Series B round in March last year from Tiger Global, IDG Ventures India and IndoUS Venture Partners. At the time, it also decided to reposition itself as a broad-based lifestyle ecommerce site. The company raised its undisclosed seed funds from Accel Partners and angel investors in late 2007 and followed with a $5 million Series A round from IndoUS Ventures, IDG Ventures and Accel in 2008.

The company, according to media reports, employs 450 people and claims 1.1 million registered users. Its current product offerings range across apparel, accessories and footwear for men, women and children.

Founded in 2009 by Quasar Media founder Hitesh Dhingra and Amanpreet Bajaj, Letsbuy raised $6 million in Series A funding early last year from Helion Venture Partners, Accel Partners and Tiger Global. The company, says sources in the venture capital industry, has been in the market for a second round of funding for some months. This, however, could not be officially confirmed. It  is likely (though not clear yet) that Letsbuy’s venture capital investors have acquired stakes in Flipkart in exchange for their stakes in Letsbuy. Executives at Helion, one of the investors in Letsbuy, declined to comment on the deal.

Incidentally, Tiger Global is a common investor in Flipkart and Letsbuy. It entered Flipkart in 2010 with a $10 million investment and followed up with a $20 million round last year. An unconfirmed January report by Mint suggests that Tiger Global and Accel (which invested $1 million in 2009) have invested $150 million in the company as part of its fourth round of funding, which values Flipkart at $850 million. It may be recalled that during the latter part of 2011, various media reports suggested that Flipkart was in talks with private equity investor General Atlantic for a similar-sized investment but at a valuation of over $1 billion.

The acquisition announced today indicates that venture capital investors, who poured nearly $400 million into the ecommerce sector in 2011, have also reacted to the Junglee entry. In setting up a platform that essentially aggregates deals from smaller ecommerce sites in India, Amazon now has an inside track on ecommerce in India without the attendant risks. While Junglee drives up its online traffic, the costs of customer acquisition, an area of concern for most local players, delivery of goods and payments (cash-on-delivery requires significant investments in logistics) will be borne by its partners. Junglee’s entry, though a soft launch of sorts for Amazon, potentially turns the ecommerce business in India on its head. Consolidation through mergers and acquisition, or even the shutting down of weaker local players, could dominate ecommerce in 2012. Larger players like Flipkart, on the other hand, will seek to buff up by buying assets. In effect, it will set up the playing field nicely for Amazon when it does make a full-fledged entry.

That makes 2012 a make-or-break year for Flipkart. The Letsbuy acquisition allows it to deepen its presence in electronics, a category it entered last year. Books, the category with which founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal started the company in 2007, now account for less than half of the company’s revenues ($11.2 million for the financial year ended March last year). The company has projected nearly $100 million in revenues for the current financial year. Letsbuy is the Bangalore-based e-tailer’s third acquisition so far. It bought digital content platform Mime360 las year and on-demand publishing firm weRead.com in 2010.

Read our previous posts on Flipkart

• Which way will Flipkart’s Bansals go?
• Is Accel eyeing a 25X partial exit from Flipkart?

Images Courtesy: Flipkart and Letsbuy

Participants: Abhishek Shah and Chetan Bafna, Fetise; Nishant Nayak, Natural Mantra; Sheetal Bahl, LensStreet; Manish Taneja, Purplle; Kashyap Dalal, Inkfruit; Nimish Adani, Engrave; Kartik Jain, Infibeam; Anand Anupam, Healthizen; Nitin Purswani, Zepo; Neerja Mittersain, Gourmetco; Elizabeth Chapman, Wonga.

You can send your summaries to ecell (dot) simsr (at) gmail (dot) com. Shortlisted applicants will be announced on February 11 and mentors will be appointed for the teams on that day.

Here’s a quick look at the rules of the contest:

• Students from management, engineering and other graduate institutions are eligible
• Teams should have a minimum of two members
• No student can be part of more than one team
• No restrictions on the number teams from an institute

The contest is inviting applications in sectors such as mobile applications, cloud computing, alternative energy and ecommerce. The first prize winner will take home Rs 20,000 and the second prize is Rs 10,000. The winners will be announced on March 17.

Editor’s Note: StartupCentral is a media partner for Inception 2012

Peel-Works was founded in 2010 by Sachin Chabra, a former Hindustan Unilever executive. It offers solutions for very large and medium enterprises in the FMCG, telecom and insurance sectors, which have large indirect sales forces. Even though over four-fifth of the sales in these sectors come in through indirect sales forces, the way companies manage this talent is either completely absent or what exists is not commensurate with the significance of their contribution to business results. This creates a dis-engaged sales force which leads to sub-optimal business results and higher operating costs. Peek-Works aims to address this problem with its solutions.

Following the investment, IAN members Srikant Sastri and Sadeesh Raghavan will join the Peel-Works board, said the press release. Other IAN members who are investors in the company include Harish Mehta and Saurabh Srivastava. In 2011, IAN invested nearly $10 million in ten startups including Jigsee, Groffr, and Vayavya.

TLabs

The accelerator requires all teams to be physically present at its premises, which are located in Noida. Ahead of the launch of Batch I, the TLabs team is also putting together a networking event, Bootcamp, for startups, says Abhishek Gupta (in photo), who currently leads the operations of the Accelerator. Gupta, who started his career at Citicorp Information Technology Industries (which later became iFlex Solutions), was vice president-technology at Lime Labs India prior to joining TLabs. Apart from Gupta, the leadership team at the accelerator includes Rishi Khiani, Gautam Sinha and Lalit Bansal.

Here’s a quick look at the five startups in Batch I:

• Bluegape – Order customized posters online and have them delivered to your doorstep
• Dataweave – Discover, monitor and visualize public data on the Internet in a uniform format
• Oravel – Book bed-and-breakfast accommodation online with individuals rather than hotels
• UberLabs – State-of-the-art computer vision-based object recognition platform for digital images
• WiC – User and social networks driven price discovery application

While it gets ready to roll out the first batch, TLabs is preparing for its next batch, which starts in August. “We’re open to ideas even at the concept stage. Though we prefer at least two founders per team, exceptions can be made for promising entrepreneurs” says Gupta. The accelerator has lined up mentors such as venture capitalist Alok Mittal from Canaan Partners, Shashikant Chaudhary who heads telecom at GlobalLogic, Vriti founder Swapnil Srivastav, and venture capitalist Mukul Singhal from SAIF Partners.

Image: StartupCentral

By the time they called it a day the next morning, the site, which merchandises affordable lifestyle products, had 1,300 transactions to show for its first outing in the ecommerce market.

A week later, when we visited the Pepperfry office deep inside Mumbai’s central suburbs, the eight-month old startup was literally bursting at the seams. The 54-odd employees who make up the Mumbai operations jostled in a space that had clearly become too small. On the far right corner of the office, a wall had been smashed in to make way into the adjoining office. “We’re occupying that space next week,” grinned Murty, who quit his job as eBay India’s country manager last June. With the extended quarters, Pepperfry’s Mumbai operations will be spread over 8,000 square feet.

Since our visit, in the last 20 days, the company has crossed 150,000 visitors and 1.5 million page views. It is in the process of hiring more people in Mumbai and at Gurgaon and Jodhpur, where the sourcing and logistics operations are based. In a few months, the company expects to double its headcount from the current 90. Though it started off with 25,000 products across categories on day one, it continues to add new products every four days. Variety and depth are the essence of the company. For instance, it currently offers 150 varieties of tables and about 90 varieties of beds. Future expansion plans also include expanding into categories such as children’s health and building out storage and logistics in other countries (it also delivers to overseas markets).

As a relatively late entrant into the ecommerce segment, Pepperfry’s frenetic pace of growth is not difficult to understand. In its category, it is up against players such as SnapDeal, Yebhi and Myntra, which have a lead of over 12 months in terms of market presence. All three represent fast-track ecommerce startups that have recently raked in venture capital investments. Given the capital-intensive nature of the business, being funded is a good thing. However, it also brings along the pressure to show rapid growth in order to keep up the valuations expected by investors.

Between January 2011 and now, venture capitalists have poured an unprecedented $400 million-plus into the Indian ecommerce sector. Pepperfry will be no exception when it comes to keeping investor valuations on track. In December, the startup raised $5 million in Series A funding from Norwest Venture Partners, which is also an investor in Dealsandyou and Fashionandyou. Prior to the funding, Shah and Murty bootstrapped the company with their personal savings. “We were barely ten days away from running out of money when the funding came in,” says Shah, half in jest. He quit as head of social shopping and business at eBay Motors India to join Murty and is now the COO of the company.

Given its current pace of growth, Pepperfry will probably need to hit the market for another round of funding soon. Fortunately, in Norwest, it does have an investor that can write large cheques for a long time.

Image Courtesy: Pepperfry

Related Posts

• Ecommerce startup Pepperfry raises $5 million from Norwest
• Q&A with Pepperfry co-founder Ambareesh Murty

Images: StartupCentral

Editor’s Note: StartupCentral is a media partner for Startup Weekend Bangalore

How have you tackled the talent shortage issue so far?

At present, we provide on-the-job training. There is an absence of nursing schools and paramedical colleges in small towns. We did try relocation but that didn’t work so well. Not too many people want to relocate to Tier II and Tier III towns. All our issues have led us down a road where we are now looking to set up our own training school. We would like to identify youngsters in areas where we are opening or have opened hospitals – people who have a fire in them.  The plan is to train them in our methods and put them back in their towns. We would also train existing staff. Training would cover different areas of operation including hospital administration and emergency medical care.

How is the training school project coming along?

We have received a lot of encouragement for the idea since the manpower issue is a common one and faced by everyone in the medical field. The existing nursing and hospital administration courses are very expensive and not necessarily designed for our needs. We are looking at a more need-based training solution. Training people in skills in emergency care for instance – our training school will address such specific needs. We have started work on the school. The concept and skeleton is ready and we are even organizing the money. We are engaging partners for training and should get it off the ground by June 2012. We hope to start a residential school and it will based be in Bangalore. We would like to use our existing set-ups and affiliations to better the curriculum.

You raised $10 million last year. Will you need more funding this year?

With the last round of funding, we are good for another two years. We are looking to add about 20 hospitals to the existing set of 15. We are looking to raise additional funds for the new training school. We might set it up as a subsidiary of Vaatsalya. The state governments also provide a lot of help for vocational institutes. So we might look at that avenue too. We need about $1.5 million as an initial investment.

What are your immediate priorities as far as your hospitals are concerned?

One of our primary initiatives in our way forward is to add trauma care to our existing network of hospitals. We are looking at doing this in the next three or four months. Adding trauma care will mean adding medical capabilities to the existing framework. We would like to add value, not competition. So, we have to check and gauge the existing facilities before adding on more. We want to do this in all our 15 hospitals. The hospital in Warangal in Andhra Pradesh, which was launched this month, is our 15^th hospital.  In that hospital we still have to figure out what is needed for trauma care. We have already completed this process in about ten of our hospitals.

Can you give us some details on your growth so far?

We started scaling operations in late 2008-2009 with a target of 200 per cent growth. In the last two years, we have seen a growth of 500 per cent. It helps that we don’t have any real competition in our geography or area of expertise. This year we plan to enter some new markets. Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu will mostly be our immediate choices. Orissa is also an option. Andhra Pradesh was a huge learning experience because it was a different market (the company started up with operations in Bangalore). We are adjusting the model. A plug-and-play approach will not necessarily work. We may need to look at revenue sharing and other adjustments, which we will figure out as we go along.

What have been your other key learnings in the journey so far?

When Ashwin (co-founder and CEO Ashwin Naik) and I we started up in 2005, we kicked off with three hospitals in Hubli, Gadag and Karwar. All three worked on different models. One was an OPD services model, the other focused on day care and the third was a nursing home and surgery outfit. In about two and a half years, we realized that in smaller towns, a nursing home is the only workable model. We shut down the other two models and since then have built hospitals with between 50 and 75 beds. Our average is between 60 and 65 beds per hospital.

In 2008, we started a dialysis center in Bijapur. The response was phenomenal. India is the world’s diabetes capital and the need for such services is immense. We also think India will be the capital for renal failure going forward. Patients have been traveling from the hinterland to access these services. We even realized that they were spending as much on travel as they were on the treatment. This center has made a big difference because many patients are old or infirm.  We are now hoping to start five new dialysis centers.  Another service that seems deficient is neo-natal intensive care. We noticed the gap and accordingly included these services at some of our hospitals.

Another big learning has been how operations in every state have to different. We started out in Karnataka but could not readily apply those knowledge and skills in Andhra Pradesh. Our real estate cost, for instance, has increased in Andhra Pradesh. We will need to factor that in as we expand to other states.

Image Courtesy: Vaatsalya

Privilege Corner was founded in June 2010 by Anshul Gupta, Nitin Mathur (co-founder of HealthPA), Harsh Azad (co-founder of VIA) and Umang Maheshwari. It raised $200,000 in angel funding in December 2010. The company works with players in the information technology and and telecom sectors on their rewards and loyalty programmes. It will implement its solution across eYantra’s 1000-plus corporate clients immediately. The solution, known as ‘Privilege Club’, works on the concept of value proposition and is centred on the element of exclusivity. It offers exclusive experiences at attractive prices through its unique collaborative subsidy sharing model.

eYantra, which was founded in 2000, is a one-stop-shop for ideation, design and execution for corporate merchandising solutions.   It currently has over 14 offline stores and 32 online stores, which offer 150 product categories and 12,000 products. It claims over 1,000 companies on its client list, which includes brands such as HCL, Microsoft, Dell, Honeywell, Nestle and Mahindra Satyam. The company raised $3.1 million in venture capital from Ventureast in 2008 and another $7.5 million from Argonaut Ventures in early 2010. It currently has over 300 people on its rolls.