HelionVC Denies Funding SmsGupShup While SmsGupShup Is Silent On The Issue
Well last week the news of Smsgupshup being funded for 10 Million $ by Helion Venture Capital and Charles River Ventures was published all across the leading digital blogs in India. It all started with a plug by pluggd and spread to medianama which also had an excellent article on why Smsgupshup would need the 10 Million $ (medianama is started by the earlier editor of contentsutra), vccircle and contentsutra itself (which aggregates news from vccircle now a days for the lack of an editor). Also techcrunch seems to have picked the news up as well and linked to pluggd as the source. They have an update as well terming it as an unconfirmed story. (thanks raghav for the techcrunch update)
While all this was happening WATBlog was trying to get in touch with both SmsGupShup and HelionVC on any official update on the status of the funding if any. And here I am publishing the respective responses from the concerned parties on the issue.
Response from Chirag Jain, VP India Operations “Thanks for your mail. Unfortunately we have not issued any notification and are not in a position to make any comments at the moment.”
Well the above diplomatic answer was expected. But what was not expected is a categorical denial from Ashish Gupta, Managing Director – Investment Advisor of Helion Venture Capital.
Ashish Gupta
When we emailed Ashish the following “Just wanted to confirm this story and if possible get some bytes from you on the same. SMSGupshup has raised 10 Million $ funding from Helion VC. Will await your response on the same.
Ashish sent us the following one line reply “the line below is incorrect.”
On probing further with this question “Would it be correct to say that helion has participated in the 10 million funding? Will await your response.”
Ashish Replied “we have not done any funding for Gupshup.”
So as far as we know and from the Horses mouth itself and not from any reliable anonymous source the funding has not happened through Helion Venture Capital atleast till 4th of July and thats when we recieved this denial from Helion.
So did blogs report something on speculation? And why didn’t Smsgupshup deny the story? And who are these sources that are confirming the story when Helion itself seems to be denying the same! No one will know until and unless both these parties come forward and speak up. On the issue of Smsgupshup’s funding I have no doubt that they both need and to certain extent even deserve the funding given that smsgupshup has taken off as the premiere group sms service provider. But who are these investors we shall hopefully know soon
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Hi Rajiv,
as we’ve mentioned in our post on the initial report, we had contacted Webaroo and received neither a confirmation, nor a denial. Like you, we’ve also contacted Ashish Gupta of Helion Ventures, and are awaiting a response from him.
Our sources have given contrary inputs on whether the funding has been closed, which is why we haven’t published a *confirmed* story.
I’m glad you liked the post on the burn rate of Push SMS services (taking Webaroo and MyToday as examples). We’ll shortly be publishing an aggregation of some excellent inputs from our readers on the business model of Push SMS services.
Thanks for the comment nikhil. I think this is the first time in a couple of years that you have commented on WATBlog. Did contentsutra ban you from doing so
Well jokes apart. Yes your post was brilliant and will look forward to the aggregation as well. And Also with regards to ashish gupta’s reply I could forward his email to you if you may want me to 
Wild guess.. SMS or Helion has a tie up with some news guys about giving an exclusive story.. so keeping mum about it right now..
err.. suddenly the guess seems stupid..
but then $10 million is a “big rumour” to float around jlt..
@nikhil that post was damn nice…
@Maneesh – Or maybe they have confirmed verbally but haven’t signed on the dotted line.
Whatever the issue I dont expect Ashish Gupta to Categorically deny something if there were talks going on. So Im not sure what to say.
thats a nice way of doing business spreading rumours before announcing deals…has seen this a lot of times cos this is the strategy to get good bargaining power with vs’s………even if they haven’t received 10million$ they would now after getting noticed on techcrunch………how could u forget to put tc article up here………
I’m sure the funding has gone through. Always liked the concept of smsgupshup. Infact Watblog was one of the first blogs to write about SmsGupShup when they launched and I’d managed to register the key word Cricket.
I wonder why NetCore’s mobs didn’t take off though.
@Eka – Ya even I think its a good product. The reason it works better than mytoday is because its an open platform compared to mytoday which is closed.
Hi Rajiv, have updated the post. Thanks for sending the mail across.
@Maneesh – thanks