Sequoia Capital MD Sumir Chadha On The Guruji Investment

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.

Midcourse Correction For Minglebox: Now A Career Focused Social Network

Sequoia Capital funded website Minglebox.com appears to have gone in for a mid-course correction, writes Pluggd.in. Minglebox was built as an online alternative to a “college hangout” (more on that here) featuring college events but now is being positioned as a “College, Education and Career” site.

The site now features:

– Educational content for preparation for MBA
– Country specific information for studying in UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Singapore
– Counlelling: They’ve also added a segment for counselling from the head of test preparation from IMS, an MBA training institute. 
– Courses Database: for MBA and IT courses

Advertisers on the site include colleges like the Asian Institute of Gaming and Animation, and foreign education counselling agencies like “The Chopras“. 

With this, Minglebox will be competing head-on with other sites in the education space like Pagalguy.com, and Info Edge’s Shiksha.com. 

Minglebox isn’t the first social networking site to go in for a mid-course correction - early last year, People Group owned Fropper.com repositioned itself as a social networking site. It had been launched as a dating site. What’s interesting is that Sequoia Capital India has invested in both People Interactive and Minglebox.com

Sequoia Capital India Closes $725mn Growth Fund

Sequoia Capital India has announced the closing of its second growth equity fund dedicated to India. $725 million has been raised to invest in late-stage, pre-IPO and public market investments. Sumir Chadha, MD of Sequoia Capital India has said that the new fund will focus on companies with a topline of over $50 million. Thus the investment size is also set to increase - to $20-70 million.

Sequoia doubled its money in Idea Cellular (invested $45 million and got $90 million), which listed last year. Around six to eight of their companies could go public within the next 12-18 months. A fairly http://www.vccircle.com/news/with-venture-and-growth-we-are-a-one-stop-shop-for-entrepreneurs target=_blank>detailed interview at VCCircle.

– Ideacts Gets $5 Million From Sequoia Capital; Launches Cybercafe Focused, Ad-Supported Product CLINCK
– SatNav Raises $7 Million From Sequoia Capital India

Ideacts Gets $5 Million From Sequoia Capital; Launches Cybercafe Focused, Ad-Supported Product CLINCK

Ideacts Innovations has announced that the company had received $5 Million in funding from Sequoia Capital; There’s a mention of the funding having taken place in November 2007, but they’ve only just announced it. The company has also launched a desktop application called CLINCK targeting cybercafes, which, according to the company, provides access to Internet applications - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, Windows Live Messenger etc, while monetizing the application with advertisements on the side.

To put it simply, CLINCKS appears to be the application that powers the access to Internet services at Cafes, serving as the desktop for Internet access users. While at first sight, it might appear that there is no real need for such an application, the opportunity is there perhaps for the cybercafe owners to earn some additional income by getting a revenue share from the advertisements. (note: we haven’t confirmed this with Ideacts yet. Will update).

CLINCK has, as per the release, already showcased over 75 Brand Campaigns for advertisers like Cadbury, Perfetti, Naukri, MakeMyTrip, Dell, Yahoo, Guruji, Radio Mirchi, Lenovo, eBay, etc. According to the release, around 36 percent of Internet access in India is via Cybercafes.

However, one worrying factor is this very dependency on Cybercafes - if the Cybercafe market is going to grow at a fairly small pace - of just 8 percent per year, it will essentially cap the opportunity for CLINCKS. Ideacts will have focus on adding to its product portfolio, and another revenue stream. At present, however, they’re focusing on expanding beyond their existing market of 8 cities - Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh, into B & C tier cities.

Ideacts was founded in March 2007 by Rudrajeet Desai, Maninder Gill and Saurabh Khullar (details here). R. Ramaraj and Mohit Bhatnagar from Sequoia have joined the companys Board of Directors. Interestingly, serial entrepreneur Alok Kejriwal is a part of the companys board of advisors.

Update: The opportunity for ideacts lies, in my opinion, in powering kiosks, particularly the rural kiosks being set up by the Indian government. However, its anybodys guess about when those will be implemented.

SatNav Raises $7 Million From Sequoia Capital India

SatNav Technologies has raised $7 million in a first round of funding from Sequoia Capital India. The amount of stake diluted has not been disclosed, though Mohit Bhatnagar, Operating Partner with Sequoia says that it’s a significant minority stake, and two members have joined the board. SatNav was incubated at Satyam Computers, under the Satyam Entrepreneur Incubation Program. Here’s a brief on the various players in the consumer GIS space (in no particular order):

ARPU and Projections: SatNav claims that it had revenues of around $1 million last fiscal, and 22000 users. That’s an ARPU of $45.5. They’re now targeting 2 lakh users by the end of this fiscal, and assuming an ARPU of $35, they should have revenues of $7 million by then; at least a 7x increase in revenues. Of course, this calculation depends on whether the numbers they’ve mentioned in the press are correct or not.

Burn Rate: FE reports that the funds should see SatNav through the next 12-18 months. That’s a burn rate of between $389,000 - $583,000 per month, or between Rs. 1.6 - 2.5 crores per month. Where will that money go?

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