Sulekha.com, one of India’s bigger social networking sites, has raised $10 million from a leading Silicon Valley venture firm, Norwest Venture Partners.
Sulekha provides Indians with 1) a networking component, meaning blogs and groups, and 2) an online marketplace for things like movies, events, travel and news in each of 25 cities. These cities are in India and in other cities with large Indian populations. These local sites also have small business listings — effectively local yellow pages directories, which most Indian cities don’t have yet.
It was founded in 2001, became profitable by 2003, but then took $4 million in a first round from individuals and has expanded aggressively at a minor loss since then, according to chief executive Satya Prabhakar. It is making millions of dollars a year in revenues, he said, but would not elaborate. The revenue is a mix of advertising and marketplace transactions, he said. He said there up to three million small businesses in India, with few places to list themselves or advertise.
We checked out the site, and noticed how different the visual experience is from U.S. sites. We got a somewhat annoying — in our opinion at least — repetitive audio-video ad (click on image here), though it went away after we started clicking some of the regional sites.
Norwest’s investor, Promod Haque, said he liked Sulekha because there is no other company with its breadth, only individual companies trying to bite off niche pieces of its offerings.
6 Comments
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Brajeshwar said:
Well, then what are they left with? The employee pool and the founder pool must have already been diluted beyond recognition. Honestly, looks more like an Indian investing back in India because he have emotional ties with the country. This is my personal take and is expressed here in the lighter vein.
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raj said:
check http://bayarea.desihub.com, much better alternative to sulekha
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Vaibhav Domkundwar - Better Labs said:
Matt:
You might want to check http://www.indiagoes.com which is a Indian news site in this 1.0 version, with an objective to expand into classified and some related gaps in the segment. The BIGGEST difference you will see is the focus on user experience and design. We strongly believe that the new generation of user friendly Indian consumer web services will beat the current ones which are terrible in user experience and have more ads than content on their pages. You can read more about our focus on our India 2.0 blog: http://blog.indiagoes.com.
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Sudip said:
I have been at Sulekha and to be very honest i found that site to be very annoying with advertisement of colors all over the page. If they get $10 mil of funding, i would say that VC’s need to focus more on ideas than contacts.
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Krish said:
Sulekha was NOT founded in 2001. It has been operational since 1996. Couldn’t compete and raise VC capital or get acquired during 1998-2000. Still, admirable that they lasted that long. Problem is wrong DNA. Good luck to NVP and Sulekha!
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Hai said:
That is good for Sulekha. Hope they will do well.
We are laughing a new website for global Indian community — http://www.desiroom.com. Before the year end, we will come out with the new layout. If Sulekha got $10M, what would that be for us…owning several social network communities.
