Carwale.com recieves 7 Million $ in Funding From Sierra Ventures
Carwale.com the standalone auto classifieds portal that raised seed funding from SeedFund in 2006. Now Carwale has raised their A series funding from Sierra Ventures (which also are one of the limited partners in seed fund) of about 7 million dollars. With is funding Tim Guleri and Vispi Daver of Sierra Ventures will join the company’s Board of Directors.
Carwale operates in a market with fewer strong players as its competing with the likes of Autoindia.com, Carazoo.com, Gaadi.com, and Indiaautomobile.com which is by consim info (bharatmatrimony.com)
This funding will surely give Carwale a shot in the arm with respect to expansions and will also enable it to get ahead of its competition. What this funding also points towards is the fact that transaction based companies are in vogue as far as the VC’s are concerned. As just recently myntra.com another transaction based online company which raised 5 million $.
I guess investors have still not built enough confidence in advertising based models. What do you think?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS Feed OR Email Alerts!
Yes Rajiv … wat u say is true – We have also had the same experience … where in we were adviced by VC’s ( when approached for funding ) to change our revenue model from AD based , to some other model ( transaction based I guess ) . And they also gave us some statistics of why AD based model is not currently good in India !! But still we believe that there is a huge potential in the local AD market in India – and have told them that we will prove it ……
The stats provided by them was this ( guess it will be of some use to readers ) :
” …. Total online ad spend in India was only around 250 crores or so. A bulk of this goes to generic portals like Indiatimes, Google, Yahoo etc. because they have large user bases. Obviously this 250 crore will grow. The rate of growth will depend on the rate of growth of internet penetration in India – which at this time isn’t too spectacular. IAMAI is a good source of info – in case you haven’t looked at it.
Until the internet penetration reaches significant numbers, it is unlikely that ad spends will be big enough for specialized businesses such as yours “