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Canaan Partners Upbeat On Investing In VAS Space (Read to Know Why)
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Canaan Partners the Venture firm that has funded the likes of BharatMatrimony (Now Consim Info) and techtribe is now looking towards the VAS space with high expectations with its new fund ready for investment. The mobile space has seen some action lately with the likes of Mkhoj, Smsgupshup raising funding.
Canaan raised about 650 Million $ fund in february this year to be invested primarily in India and Israel. On the prospects of the VAS space Mr.Harish Gandhi of Canaan India said, “There is a lot of excitement in mobile VAS [anything other than voice and SMS] space. It gives us a great opportunity to invest in companies with good technology platform and content”
Its no surprise that Canaan looks so upbeat and the reasons could be no further than the Telecom numbers than keep growing month on month. Just last month i.e. June numbers had shown a 8.9 million addition to the mobile subscribed and come July that number has risen to 9.22 million subscribers taking the total mobile subscribers tally to 297 million subscribers with 218.9 with GSM players and 77 million with CDMA players according to this article.
And its not only the mobile subsctibers even the VAS market is set to boom in 2009. Check the graph below:
Check out the entire report below:
There is also a presentation on the Mobile VAS which should give you tremendous insights on where this space is headed:
Last year there were quite a few deals in this space.. Here is a list (via Livemint):
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humm yeah the mobile VAS industry is currently ver hot and will grown only bigger from here, but lets just hope TRAI doesnt sopil the party. TRAI had recently put forth a consultation paper on the VAS industry, which was not liked by many major VAS players in India. you can check it here
Hey rajiv,
Thanks for the great resources on MVAS.
Though I’m not sure what Mr Gandhi meant when he said that “There is a lot of excitement in mobile VAS [anything other than voice and SMS] space.
@vaneet: I guess he meant only mobile apps and not IVR or sms driven models
@Rajiv
That was exactly the answer that I did’nt want to hear!!!
I wonder what he thinks about the recent plethora of social networking and IM applications like the recent one from BigAdda and others like Fring.