Internet and mobile companies have something to cheer this month. If the press announcements are anything to go by then the recession seems to be behind us as few startups have started announcing their breakeven expectations in the coming months. Leading among these is auto centric portal Carwale which has announced that it expects to break even by Q3 of FY10 reports exchange4media.
Carwale was seedfunded by Seedfund and then raised an A series round of funding of 7 million $ from Sierra Ventures. Carwale has recently been active in the auto space by tying up with Nano for its booking as well as Skoda for online sales. So besides for the car listing revenue such commerce based revenues have also added to the carwale kitty.
The next step for Carwale is to add a mobile site for their portal. With good amount of funding in the bank and now break even on the horizon it does seem that Carwale is doing well for its own car as far as the race of the vertical portals is concerned.
The other startup which has claimed break even soon is an unlikely candidate in Smsgupshup.com. The reason I say unlikely is because their cost of sending smses coupled with the circumspect outlook people had towards sms ads made it a tough business to crack. But backed by Helion Ventures for 10 million dollars Smsgupshup has ventured into the SME segment with its reseller model. Smsgupshup has also made some big tieups like the one with Facebook and also leveraged the swineflu phenomenon by launching a community for the same.
Smsgupshup currently claims 25 million users and this huge base is what it believes will drive advertisers to its doorsteps. Smsgupshup has stated that its 6 months away from breaking even which is a big achievement considering that they have huge costs when it comes to sms.
Hi Rajiv,
Are we talking about monthly (read operational) break even or recovery of the cash burnt or invested so far??
Its monthly/ ops breakeven for sure.
With Airtel imposing sms interconnect charges, gupshup is reportedly losing Rs 2-3lacs/day or 5mn/month. How do you rate its chances of surviving such losses now?