VentureBeat

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.

Richard Rudometkin, founder of new gay social networking site BigJock.com, looked us up today to mention his site went live last Thursday. It’s offering a drawing for a free iPod for those who register before the official launch on Nov 5th.

He has launched this from a spare bedroom in North San Jose, and it is self-funded.

Naturally, our question was how his site differs from all the other gay social networking companies out there. Our suspicion is that it is getting late to launch new social networking sites, even if they are niche. We pointed out there is at least ten or so rivals out there, including Gay.com, Manjam, GuyParty and Jake. How is his service any better, we asked?

For starters, BigJock will have photo albums, blogs, journals, forums and classifieds, as well as “Hot or Not” ratings of members. It will be adding IM, and free video and email. He wants to emulate MySpace’s features and user-friendly feel. So far, so good. Many of those are standard features.

ManJam is very thorough, he conceded. (Type in “gay social network” into Google, and it is the second result). But ManJam and Jake are both UK-based, and his research found that U.S. men had a level of “disconnect” with these sites, he said.

Gay.com was the most mentioned site, but that site attempts to be all things to all people (meaning women), he said.

So BigJock is aiming for the educated urban professionals and college-aged. He’s aiming to go international. And he hopes to offer features that exceed these others. Being based in Silicon Valley, that might help.

We’ve just noticed that TechCrunch has also just written a more thorough review of the gay sites.