Social venture capital investor Acumen Fund has made an equity investment of Rs 9 crore ($2 million) into BASIX Krishi Samruddhi Ltd. Part of Vijay Mahajan’s Basix Group, the company provides agriculture-related support and business development services to farmers. Set up in April 2010, BASIX Krishi provides a plethora of services like soil testing, seed treatment, vermicomposting, pest management and good harvesting practices for crop farmers; and livestock vaccination, para-vet services, fodder demonstration and milk market linkages for dairy farmers. The firm charges fees for its services and operates through a network of ‘livelihood service providers’. BASIX Krishi plans ...

Delhi-based Giftcart Ecommerce Pvt Ltd has received $1 million as seed capital from TekCorp. Giftcart, a portfolio company of TekCorp, has also launched its website Giftcart.com in private beta today. The company will use the funds to develop the portal platform, implement business/customer processes and build a supply chain. It will also raise more funds in the next six months. Giftcart has been set up by Shaloo Reddi (managing director) and Kristina Hermanns (director & GM for customer experience) on April 18, 2012, and it is targeting both Indian residents and NRIs who want to send gifts to their ...

Facebook Inc's record initial public offering is already oversubscribed, a source familiar with the share listing said, days after the world's largest social network embarked on a cross-country roadshow to drum up investor enthusiasm. Despite concerns about slowing growth, a lofty valuation and signs the company is having trouble ramping up revenue from mobile advertising, institutional investors have so far indicated demand for more shares than Facebook has available, the source told Reuters. Analysts say the company, which is seeking to raise about $10.6 billion by selling more than 337 million shares at $28 to $35 apiece ...

Hyderabad-based Ybrant Digital Ltd, a digital marketing solutions company, has entered into an agreement to acquire PriceGrabber, LowerMyBills and ClassesUSA.com from Experian plc, an information services company which is currently one of the top five Internet advertisers in the US. Ybrant will acquire these three businesses for a total of $175 million (around Rs 938 crore), including $100 million in cash and another $75 million ‘loan note’. The deal will add a business of $283 million (revenues from the three businesses for the year ended March 31, 2012) and will increase Ybrant’s employee strength by 300. Steve Krenzer ...

In tune with its promise to look at smaller e-commerce firms for acquisition, lifestyle and fashion e-tailer Yebhi.com has acquired Stylishyou, an online shop offering fashion jewellery. The deal includes both cash and equity, and Yebhi has also acquired the merchandising team as part of this deal. However, the monetary details of the deal have not been undisclosed. Set up in January 2011 by entrepreneur Shraddha Danani, Stylishyou is positioned to be a one-stop portal for exclusive brands of designer jewellery and accessories. Shraddha’s previous outing as an entrepreneur was at Design Studio, which housed designer home accessories ...

Cbazaar, an online retailer offering Indian ethnic wear and accessories, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding from Inventus Capital Partners and Ojas Venture Partners. Launched in 2005, Cbazaar was bootstrapped by founders Rajesh Nahar and Ritesh Katariya, and this is the first round of institutional funding. As part of the deal, Samir Kumar, managing director of Inventus Advisory Services, and Pavan Krishnamurthy, Partner, Ojas, will join the board of Cbazaar. Commenting on the fundraising, CEO and co-founder Nahar said, “We launched Cbazaar.com in 2005 for the international market and have recently introduced Cbazaar.in to target ...

New York-based digital magazine store Magzter Inc. has secured series A funding from IndoUS Venture Partners. Although the exact amount has not been disclosed, it is reportedly in the range of $3-5 million. Magzter was set up in June 2011 by two Indians -- Vijaykumar Radhakrishna and Girish Ramdas. And the service has been available in India since October last year. Currently, Magzter claims to house around 400 magazines from India, Singapore, the UAE (Dubai), Malaysia, the US and the UK. Hosted on Amazon's Cloud platform, Magzter also enables publishers to digitise their publications and sell those to global users ...

Two years ago, as an Internet analyst based out of Silicon Valley (covering Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo! and all other global Internet majors), I wrote a  sector-defining report on India Internet. The market then was at a nascent stage except for online travel and online classifieds. Since then, we have seen a huge euphoria about the Internet, especially a sizable adoption of e-commerce. This euphoria is not a short-term trend and will continue for many years to come. India is not only among the top three countries in terms of Internet population but also among the most underpenetrated when it ...

Dear Readers, VCCircle.com, your favourite business news website, has gone from strength to strength since it was founded in 2005. Thank you for your support and encouragement, which have helped us carry forward and improve upon our offerings constantly. Today, we probably have India's largest online-only editorial team, and we are also clearly the most focused and the best in the industry -- with more than a dozen reporters and editors writing on deals, trends in private equity, venture capital, M&A, investment banking and path-breaking companies. Creating quality, accurate and relevant content to help you in your decision-making ...

International Finance Corporation (IFC) is looking to up its bet on the Indian microfinance institutions by considering a total of Rs 150 crore investments in Equitas Holdings Pvt Ltd and Ujjivan Financial Services Pvt Ltd. The World Bank arm has earlier invested in MFIs like Bandhan Financial Services, Utkarsh Micro Finance and Swadhaar Finserv, among others. IFC is looking to invest Rs 100 crore or $20 million in the newly created holding company of Chennai-based Equitas. IFC’s investment in Equitas will come at a time when the firm has restructured itself into a holding company for three businesses – microfinance ...

For four years Chris Viehbacher has been bracing himself for a nasty turn. Since being appointed Sanofi’s chief executive in 2008, he has been diversifying the French drugmaker to prepare for the moment it loses US patent protection on one of its most lucrative products. “It’s T-minus 3 weeks,” Mr Viehbacher says. Along with its US partner Bristol-Myers Squibb – Sanofi is set to see sales of Plavix, the blood-thinner that is the world’s top selling medicine, drop sharply this year from nearly €7bn in 2011. Along with many of his peers in the pharmaceutical industry, he faces ...

ICICI Securities Ltd has appointed L Govind as head of structured products and corporate debt restructuring (CDR). Prior to this appointment, Govind was working with Reliance Capital Ltd (RCL), where he was monitoring RCL’s debt and equity investments in corporates. Govind is a visiting faculty at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) and Institute of Company Secretaries of India (ICSI). He holds a post-graduate diploma in management from IIM-Lucknow and also a BE degree in Mechanical Engineering from Vikram University, Ujjain. “Structured products and corporate debt restructuring is one of our key businesses of ICICI Securities and ...

Facebook Inc aims to raise about $10.6 billion in Silicon Valley's largest IPO, dwarfing the coming-out parties of tech companies like Google Inc and granting the world's largest social network a market value close to Amazon.com's. The eight-year-old social network that began as Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room project indicated an initial public offering price range of between $28 and $35 a share on Thursday, which would value the company at $77 billion to $96 billion. The size of the IPO reflects the company's growth and bullish expectations about its money-making potential as ...

Accel Partners' Subrata Mitra has joined the list of some of the renowned venture capital investors in world thanks to the early investment bet on Flipkart, the country’s largest ecommerce firm. Mitra figures in the latest Forbes Midas List for top 100 global tech investors. Although Indian names are not unusual in the annual list, till now bulk of them were persons of Indian origin (mostly US-based VCs). Mitra is one of the rare India-based venture capitalist to be featured on the list. While Mitra came in ranked at 99, Accel's Silicon Valley-based partner Jim Breyer topped the ...

Three-and-a-half year old iNiD Digimedia Pvt Ltd, which launched TV program guide iDubba, has raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from a bunch of investors including Rajan Anandan (MD, Google India), Srikant Sastri (country chairperson Vivaki India), Abhishek Rungta & Pallav Nadhani (Founders of Seeders) among others. It was inducted in the Morpheus’s startup accelerator program one-and-a half year back. The Noida-based startup is basically a platform that brings social element to TV shows, by letting viewers discover shows based on their profile likes and dislikes. In order to get alerted about their programs of choice, iDubba has a ...

Innoz Technologies Pvt Ltd, a mobile search platform, has secured Series A funding from Seedfund (http://seedfund.in). Although the amount raised has not been disclosed, it is estimated to be between $2-5 million and will be used in marketing, hiring people and strengthening the technology base to support the increase in demand and traffic. As a part of this funding, Mahesh Murthy, managing partner of Seedfund, has joined Innoz’s board. Innoz’s mobile query product SMSGyan (now rebranded) works on a short code ‘55444’, giving instant results on queries through an SMS. The company offers this service at ...

Mumbai-based Just Dial Ltd, which runs an India-specific local business listings site, will raise Rs 360 crore (~$68 million) through a public issue which may hit the markets within the next 8-10 weeks, sources close to the development told VCCircle.  This would make it the biggest public issue by an Indian company in the consumer Internet business. Besides the primary issue of shares, the IPO also includes a secondary offering of 10.64 million shares by private investors SAIF Partners, Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital India besides the company’s promoter VSS Mani.  SAIF had also part exited along ...

Mumbai-based Just Dial Ltd, which runs an India-specific local business listings site, will raise Rs 360 crore (~$68 million) through a public issue which may hit the markets within the next 8-10 weeks, sources close to the development told VCCircle.  This would make it the biggest public issue by an Indian company in the consumer Internet business. Besides the primary issue of shares, the IPO also includes a secondary offering of 10.64 million shares by private investors SAIF Partners, Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital India besides the company’s promoter VSS Mani.  SAIF had also part exited along ...

Over the next few years successful e-commerce companies in India should end up looking like the department store, selling products from various verticals. I cautiously make this claim backed by 20 years of  entrepreneurial experience as well as an investor in over 15 startups many of which are in e-commerce. Entrepreneurs venturing into e-commerce need to understand this point and make a business plan accommodating their expansion plans into other categories of products before seeking an investment. The Rationale Through my experience I have learned that entrepreneurs always tend to underestimate the cost of customer acquisition. Currently customer acquisition is ...

KKR & Co LP said Friday that income from its share of investors' profits and the fees it charges for its assets slumped in the first quarter, prompting the private equity firm to cut its dividend, albeit less than some analysts expected. On other metrics, such as the value of its portfolio, however, earnings were better than expected, highlighting the challenges investors face in valuing private equity firms as Carlyle Group LP prepares to go public. KKR, whose investments include retailer Toys R US Inc, Internet domain registration company Go Daddy Group Inc and hospital operator HCA Holdings Inc, said first-quarter ...

Communications technology firm Prime Telesystems (Ltd) or PrimeTel has raised Rs 300 crore (~$60 million) from an Asian telecom firm by selling less than 10 per cent stake, as it prepares to launch its premium-priced communications services in India, a company spokesperson told VCCircle. He did not disclose the name of the investor but said it is an Asian government controlled tier I telco. Some of the firms which fit the bill include Singapore Telecom (a public listed firm in which Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund is a large shareholder) besides Axiata (formerly Telekom Malaysia). Both these Asian telcos have ...

South-African media conglomerate Naspers owned MIH Group has acquired majority stake in six years old Gurgaon-based travel company Tek Travels which runs the B2B travel portal Travel Boutique Online . Tek Travels was started by Gaurav Bhatnagar and Ankush Nijhawan  in 2005. Both the founders hail from the technology background where Bhatnagar is an IIT Delhi alumnus and Nijhawan studied in Bryant University. The portal Travel Boutique Online was started in 2006 and mainly deals with the B2B travel needs. It provides air & train tickets, besides hotels, bus or car booking, visa enquiry, travel insurance and even chartered planes and helicopters ...

It has been a strong start to the year for technology flotations. Venture capital backers have had their best year for issuance in five years, raising $1.5bn in the first quarter, according to industry figures. These deals have performed well, also averaging a first-day gain or “pop” this year of 17 per cent. If sustained, that performance would be the best in over a decade, says Dealogic. Since the start of January, shares of companies that have gone public in the past two years are up 15 per cent, according to the FTSE Renaissance US IPO index. That is ...

Barely six months after raising $1 million in series A from venture capital firm Accel Partners, SaaS-based social customer support startup Freshdesk has raised $5 million in another round of funding led by Tiger Global Management. Previous investor, Accel Partners, is also participating in the round. The company will be using the funds raised in this round to ramp up engineering and build more product features. Freshdesk also plans to expand its global support team to meet the growing demand. Freshdesk is a social customer service software that allows companies to support customers through both traditional support channels like email ...