Corrigendum: There were a few factual inaccuracies in the original post. We have updated it with corrections:
Community based product reviews platform, Reviews42, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Blume Ventures, MediaNama has learned.Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner at Blume Ventures confirmed the investment to us, but declined to reveal the exact amount invested. He also confirmed that a representative from Blume would be joining the board of the company, but said that the company had not finalised who it would be. The other investor in Reviews42 is Venture East. The company’s founders include Surjendu Kuila and Neeraj Jain and Mani Jagadeesan; the three had co-founded brand engagement platform, Brandandme.com, last year. Update: Neeraj Jain informs that Mani Jagadeesan is not a co-founder in the company though he was involved in the early days of BrandAndMe as tech lead.
Reviews42, as the name suggests, aggregates user reviews based on ratings/rankings taken from users. It claims to cover 6032 products across categories like Computer & accessories, Mobile Phones, Electronics, Clothes and bags, food and beverages, kitchen and home appliances, health and beauty, baby products, home and lifestyle, and shoes, with a total of 2934 reviews contributed by 1369 reviewers.
The site uses third party APIs such as webpurify, akismet to moderate abusive/spam reviews, and claims that it doesn’t feature any paid reviews, and that no brands are involved in moderation. It offers discount coupons from Shoppers Stop and Flipkart as incentives to reviewers who contribute. Correction: Coupons are offered to the best review of the day (not to all users who contribute ). Although it says that it discourages brands to contribute reviews without disclosing their identity, we’re not sure how it does that. It does feature Reputation ratings for reviewers and a leaderboard of reviewers.
Reviews42 allows users to browse and search through products by brand, categories, features and price, and offers a detailed specification page along with user reviews, expert reviews, buying tips and over all ratings. It also features a comparison engine. The site would compete with user generated reviews sites like MouthShut.com, in addition to price comparison engines such as MySmartPrice, which also feature user reviews.
