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.”
Our earlier story on Guruji here.
