SingTel has acquired online food review site Hungrygowhere for $12 million. The startup is being merged with SIngTel arm inSing.com. This is SingTel’s third startup acquisition this year.
London-based Last Voices, a company that brings vanishing cultures to the masses through the performing arts, has launched Binumi, a multi-lingual digital video platform. Check out the features.
Social networking site Facebook will go public on the Nasdaq on Friday, ringing in what is being tipped as the largest ever initial public (IPO) offering by a technology company. The final offer price is speculated at between $34 and $38, which means that the Menlo Park, California-headquartered company could end up raising nearly $16 [...]
Hyderabad-based eHealth Access, an online healthcare startup that earlier provided medical consultation services over chat and telephone under the brand name Dialurdoctor, plans to open talks with investors for second round of funding after the third quarter of the current year. The company recently raised $ 0.37 million (Rs 2 crore) in angel funding from [...]
Bangalore-based ItsMyMeal, a online meal delivery services startup, has raised $10 million from a group of unnamed angel investors. The company’s founders are IIT and IIM graduates Nikhil Gupta, Anoop Agarwal and Neeraj Kumar. The company provides customized, home-cooked meals which are currently sourced from a central kitchen. (Source: The Economic Times). Delhi-based ad network Tyroo and [...]
Inventus Capital Partners has made a Rs 5 crore (sub $1 million) Series A round investment in Bangalore-based online chauffeur-driven car rental service Savaari Car Rental. The company has a network of over 100 operators across 60 cities and has clocked over seven lakh trip hours and 75 lakh trip kilometer so far. The funds raised will [...]
SPRING Singapore-backed Referoll, an online service that recruits people for market research project by offering incentives and rewards, plans to launch its services in Delhi and Bangalore this August. Munshi Labs, the company which owns the Referoll brand, is in talks with investors to raise about S$100,000 to market the brand, recruit more developers and [...]
Earlier this month, Chennai-based Sulekha.com launched a Rs 5 crore marketing campaign to headline a brand and business repositioning exercise. The move follows the classifieds and local search company’s foray into ecommerce last October. It now positions itself as an integrated local ecommerce company. Founded in 2002 by former AT&T and TCS executive Satya Prabhakar [...]
This one is too funny to be passed up. In a seemingly incredulous offer, New York-based online meeting platform developer SalesCrunch is making a $1 acquisition bid for Cisco Systems’ web conferencing service WebEx. As a sweetener, it is also offering Cisco a 15 per cent stake in the company. To communicate the seriousness of its [...]
Chennai-based budget hotel rooms aggregator StayZilla has raised $500,000 as part of its first round of funding from Indian Angel Network (IAN). The company offers an inventory of 4,000 hotels in 600 Tier I, II and III towns. Rooms in over 350 towns can be booked online through the StayZilla site. The funding from IAN will [...]
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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