We’ve just received a response from Sumir Chadha, MD, Sequoia Capital India, about the prospects of their investment in Guruji.com – Guruji co-founder Gaurav Mishra has left the company and there was word that Sequoia had written off the investment, which Chadha has denied. In an emailed response to MediaNama, he writes:
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“We are very positive on Guruji and invested again in the company in the series B financing round led by Sandstone. If you check out Alexa, you will see that Indian internet users agree with our assessment – traffic for Guruji has been growing very nicely over the past six months — on the back of their launch of India’s first music search product. The company has also seen nice revenue growth in the past few months, and has spent very little of the $8mm series B we raised at the beginning of this year. Their monthly expenses are very modest, and they have built a crack engineering team with lots of IIT Computer Science guys.
We are very optimistic about Guruji’s prospects.”
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Guruji has been searching for the right search to make it big with – they have a web search in 8 languages (7 Indic), City Search, Movie timing search, Music search, and a recently launched Image search. VCCircle had written about a probable investment in Guruji from Sandstone and Sequoia investment last year; in a sense, this confirms it. Any idea of what “nice revenue” means?
Update: Chadha on Guruji revenues – “We don’t disclose revenues for any of our private companies, but I can share with you that they have signed up a lot of top advertisers in India, which you will see in the sponsored links of their search results, and revenues are growing very fast.”
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15 Comments until now.
Hi
As I mentioned in one of my comment related to GuruJi, Guruji is trying to be theme based like movie timimg search, city based search etc search engine rather than content based search engine like Google. I feel there is market for theme based search engines in India. It will take some time but it will pick up.
Thanks,
Rajeev
http://www.brandsindiaonline.com
What else could he have said?!
@OptimistTillDie : He could have said “who let the dog(News)out ??”
Just out of curiosity, who are India’s top advertisers? I searched for Shoes, Sports, Beauty Products, Shah Rukh Khan, Financial Products & saw ads (err.. ad) for the last one only! Anyway, their music search seems to have an Advt Box similar to that of Google Adsense boxes & pretty filled up with ads. Alexa shows growth so kudos if they are able to bring in more traffic & advertisers! But i need gyan on this. Who spends the most on Indian Online/Digital Advertising scene? Is there some kind of statistics on this?
What a standard PR statement !! :)… To begin with, Alexa data can not be trusted. Also, when Sandstone invested, Sequoia just invested enough to maintain its stake, it does not count as investing. Also, insiders say, it took a lot of effort to get any one interested in Guruji and at the end it was only Paresh Patel (Sandstone) who was coaxed to invest. BTW, I just looked at Alexa, Guruji’s traffic has not gone up in the last 6 months … why do VCs make random statements and avoid saying the truth and accepting a mistake !!
Alexa, google trends and compete.com all indiacate some growth in the traffic (though the google trends indicate that a major portion of the growth happened before the launch of music product). Interestingly, alexa does not indiate that most of the traffic on the site goes to music.guruji.com, as should have been the case if music was the key driver. However, google trends indicate the most of the related visits are to music sites, so perhaps the traffic is driven by music. Seems a bit confusing, but I won’t be surprised if the music has brought good traffic, because they clearly have a differentiator in music. Interestingly, they have recently started showing links for MP3 downloads in addition to streaming. Shouldn’t that get the music labels gunning for them again? Another thing I don’t understand is if the series A and B were as large as Mr. Chadhdha has “clarified” to be, then why are they not spending that money. Where did the series A money go? Guruji seems to raise more questions than answer :)
Another investment that seems to be similarly shrouded in mystery is Minglebox. I hear that they are in the market to raise capital and Sequoia is not participating. It is also unlikely that the whole series A of $7M was released as there is no evidence of big spending by Minglebox.
Guruji has build a good search engine infrastructure. They have the understanding/data on what people are searching for. They should now concentrate on top 3-4 verticals money making verticals and use their core infrastructure to good use.
Hotel, Shopping, Credit Card, Travel Booking and Matrimonials are some of money making verticals they should concentrate on. For Hotels, they could start by getting feeds from Hotelscombined etc. do backend translation to different languages rollout an integrated hotel meta search engine in different languages.
@Ravi : I disagree with you on infrastructure point . their index is not as big as you think and they don’t even have a transliteration interface on their home page . basic expectation when you build a vernacular search engine . either the founders were clueless ( unlikely) or the “Suits” were meddling too much in the products ( probable) .
Minglebox is another venture showing which is nothing more that hybrid of Education+ entertainment+ Social networking . Duh !!
Reading nikhil’s comment about the minglebox reminds me of some news floating around when minglebox raised its first round of investments. There was some bit of coverage of the fact that Kavita Iyer ( Founder- Mingle Box ) happened to be Sandeep Singhal’s wife. Lot of people did have some not so pious thoughts about the entire thing. And again some did think that sequoia was doing the right thing. So now have they realised that it wasnt a wise deal at all.
Being someone who has interacted with sequoia quite a bit, my earnest request would they should stop behaving the ever right people they claim to be.
The comment is obvious and standard one, even if they have written off internally they wouldnt make this public, as they would still hope to recover some money from this investment. Guruji just on search space with 20 odd million page views, wouldnt make much of revenues, and they have targetted 20Cr by end of 2009, so their target is very reasonable, but would that be enough (assuming they meet their targets) to survive? Big Question… So Mr Sumir your money is gone…
So the IIT engineers is what that is going to save Guruji?
@Longway to go :- Dude..do you by any chance aware of the pain of generating revenue?? 20 crore of advertising revenue is just a dream ..FYI.
If their traffic is good on music, its gonna get affected by Phulki.com’s entry.
Sequoia continues to be dreaming. Is Guruji even worth using?
How can they earn Rs 20 crore? Search for things on the site and you will see for yourself how bad it is.
I have not seen a single ad being served from guruji on third party sites.
It is sad such seniour finance gurus get away by talking crap
I have had the previledge to have a short stint with guruji when I was in bangalore. To speak my heart out, it never seemed like guruji would go far, this inspite of the fact that the company had some amazing talent. However the chief problem within was that the internal politics was of an unbelievably high magnitude. So I am not at all surprised by the deparure of Gaurav or the pulling out of Sequoia(I am sure they did). They also lost some very creative people thanks to their politics. However I have nothing personal against the company and I truly hope they do well.