The Venture Intelligence Blog

The latest $700 million funding for Flipkart got announced not in the form of press releases as on previous occasions, but through leaks and confirmations . Also, the new round does not seem to have attracted any new investors. The closure of rival Snapdeal's $500 million round is reported to have been protracted over mismatch in valuation expectations. Why the seeming nervousness among investors over India's two E-Commerce poster children? Is it the crash of Alibaba's stock price in recent months? Or something else? Media executive-turned-Private Equity investor Haresh Chawla has some answers in his new post at Founding Fuel . Extracts: On why an IPO is impractical for Flipkart, SnapDeal Most listed Unicorns in the West eventually trade at earning multiples that range between 40 and 60 times their earnings. Listed Indian internet companies like Naukri, Justdial and Makemytrip trade at similar multiples....Flipkart, now eight years old, to justify its $15 bill...

Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham thinks so. Citing the example of uber angel investor Ron Conway (Google, Facebook, Twitter), he explains why in his recent blog post  (emphasis mine): The startup world became more transparent and more unpredictable. Both make it harder to seem good without actually being good.  It's obvious why transparency has that effect. When an investor maltreats a founder now, it gets out. Maybe not all the way to the press, but other founders hear about it, and that means that investor starts to lose deals.  The effect of unpredictability is more subtle. It increases the work of being inconsistent. If you're going to be two-faced, you have to know who you should be nice to and who you can get away with being nasty to. In the startup world, things change so rapidly that you can't tell. The random college kid you talk to today might in a couple years be the CEO of the hottest startup in the Valley. If you can't tell who to be nice to, you have ...

Silicon Valley lore has several famous episodes of acquisition talks that did not materialize: from that of Google by Excite (whose CEO apparently refused to pay up $75,000) and by Yahoo  (when the Google founders walked away from a $3-B offer) and that of Yahoo (for $44.6 B) by Microsoft . In March 2015, the lore extended to Indian shores when,  InMobi - which dares to combat Google and Facebook in the mobile advertising segment - walked away from a $1 billion offer from the search engine giant (according to multiple media reports, sample:  Business Insider ). Will  InMobi CEO Naveen Tewari's decision to walk away  turn out as well as that of Google's own or more Yahoo like? Only time will tell. But questions are being raised as to why, when other Indian startups like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Ola are able to attract investments at   valuations of multiple billions of dollars with seeming ease  over the last couple of years, hasn't InMobi (that las...

With enthusiasm for angel investments in India at an all time high, Venture Intelligence is happy to announce a new feature to its Angel Investments database: the ability to search listings of companies seeking angel / seed capital in your city. Integrating company and investor profiles from the world’s best known angel deals platform - AngelList - the Venture Intelligence Angel Investments database allows its users to further search and filter listings by company name, city and amount of funding sought. To look up companies seeking angel capital in your city right away, just login to the Venture Intelligence PE/VC Deal Database . Don’t have a login? Contact Us for a demo.

From the article by the Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu in Economic Times : Another day , another hot tech company raises $500 million (or is it a billion?) in Series D, Series E -I propose we just call all of it Series QE, because that is where all the money comes from anyway , right?   ..If you are in one of those hot companies burning cash, enjoy the ride as long as it lasts--and make sure you have a safety net if, heaven forbid, something bad happens. But what about companies that cannot or don't want to raise that kind of money?  ...In the world of business and finance, following fashion is the path to the poorhouse. Avoiding the fashionable location, the fashionable field and, dare I say , fashionable employees, may be the best way to survive a bubble. Venture Intelligence is the leading provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India. Click Here to Sign Up for th...

With  Tiger Global  and other global investors straying into VC territory in the hunt for the next set of Unicorns, the (  Lee Fix(el)ated  ? ) Indian VC firms - whose fund size mathematics earlier disallowed them from "writing cheques" of less than $1-2 million - have been actively foraying into seed funding zone competing and often co-investing with angels and seed funds. But what type of investor should entrepreneurs prefer for their seed round - if they have the luxury of a choice between angels, seed funds and VC firms? Mukund Mohan, the former head of Microsoft Ventures, recommends going with angels and seed firms. Extracts from his post titled " Does raising institutional money at the seed stage help or hurt? ": If you are looking to raise money and you have an interested later-stage VC investor willing to put money in your company, by all means you should take it. Assuming they will invest later is a big leap of faith. There are, like most things in th...