Rediff.com has sold its stake in Adnear (previously known as Imere), a location based company which it had bought a minority stake in, in 2009, for $1.14 million, Rediff.com has disclosed. In November 2012, AdNear had raised Rs 35 crore (around $6.2 million at current levels) from Sequoia Capital India and Canaan Partners. AdNear offers location based mobile advertising solutions in India, Singapore, Australia, and other Asia-Pacific countries, and leverages precise location, behaviour, and profiling of consumers, to assist advertisers in reaching relevant audience. At the time that Rediff funded the company, it had among its products, a buddy finder application called Ohe! Rediff Chairman and Founder Ajit Balakrishnan said that, responding MediaNama's query on the stake sale on its conference call, that "It started out as a location sensing app on mobile. They have ambitions to grow very fast and they got a couple of big private equity companies to invest. Intially we had thought that we would...our investment has always been strategic, in the sense that if somebody finds success, we expand. We thought we would take a step back, because there is a general re-focusing of everything that we do. Mobile location sensing has other solutions than what Imere has, so I think, we said it's fine, we wish you well, and we go our separate ways."
