Update: Ashish Gupta of Helion Venture Partners has, in an emailed response, told WATBlog that “we have not done any funding for Gupshup.” That, of course, doesn’t mean that the deal isn’t in process. Do note that we haven’t received a definitive statement from Webaroo, and no response yet from Helion, but we do have a copy of the mail sent to WATBlog
Original post (July 4): Mobile startup Webaroo has raised $10 Million in funding from Helion Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures, according to Pluggd.in. The report is unconfirmed, and though we’ve tried, we haven’t yet received a confirmation or a denial from the company.
About
Over the past couple of months, we’ve heard about Webaroo looking for funding. Webaroo has a couple of mobile based products – the first is an application that helps store web-pages for offline usage on desktop and mobile, with several customized “packs” of content like on Football, Delhi, Manchester United etc. The second is an SMS based social application that allows users to communicate with their subscribers via SMS – similar to a newsletter on the Internet.
Previous Round
The company had previously raised $7.5 million of $10 million in a second round of funding: investors include Cambrian Fund, Lloyd George Asian Plus Fund and HTSG.
We’ll have an update on this in the evening, so…watch this space.
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2 Comments until now.
Oh !
This is not such a good news. Looks like the deal might be ON and still in execution.
I heard MyToday is also looking raise funds. I do not have clue in what business case these guys (and other free SMS content/service providers) can even attain a break-even.
Do Webaroo/MyToday/Wakao and other FSP think, this is internet-no-money-still-a-”great”-idea era and some Sify-Indiaworld like mad deal could be made?
I am sure, this time it could be longer and tougher journey.
Intersting fact: Ashish Gupta/Rakesh Mathur and Ram Sriram were together at Junglee and Amazon thereafter.
Many of us are aware who’s talking to whom, but unless the deal is closed, a story-break might adversely affect deals. Like I’ve mentioned – I’ve heard contrarian inputs from many players.