Canaan Partners Invests In Bollywood Portal, Chakpak.com; Possibly Around $5 Million
It’s a boomtime investment during a slowdown. Bollywood portal Chakpak.com which hopes to make money from advertising and merchandising has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Canaan Partners and the existing seed partner, Accel India, formerly Erasmic Venture Fund. ET puts the funding amount at $5 million.
What prompted Canaan to invest in Chakpak is its market potential. Alok Mittal, Managing Director, Canaan Partners, India explains that out of a base of 40 million online users in India, 18 million are already accessing some or the other entertainment destination. This put together with the demand for Indian content outside India totals to 25 -30 million users. Mittal says “it’s a large category. Since chakpak.com gets 5 million visitors every month, they have shown very strong traction over the last 12 months in building a significant presence.”
The site claims to get 5 million unique visitors a month which is about 20% of the overall consumption of online entertainment in India and by NRIs.
According to The PricewaterhouseCoopers and FICCI Frames Report, the Indian online media and entertainment market is expected to grow to $36 billion by 2012.
Though chakpak’s services largely revolve around films, they also plan to tap other revenue streams such as movie marketing, movie merchandising, and pay per download movie views. Chakpak will compete with the likes of Bollywood Hungama (formerly IndiaFM), Buzz18, ZoomTV, E24Bollywood and MyPopKorn.
This story has been provided by our content partner VCCircle.
Posted In: Entertainment, Movies, Bollywood, Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Venture Capital
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Comments (11)
Dec 23, 2008 2:38 PM
Never knew there was this much interest in bollywood, looks like india has something in the near future
Dec 25, 2008 2:34 AM
Chakpak, which is the fastest growing Indian online entertainment community with a global membership base, has initial focus on movies communities. This latest investment in Chakpak further highlights Canaan Partners’ ongoing commitment to early-stage technology deals in India. The investment will accelerate Chakpak’s growth and product offerings while enhancing its delivery infrastructure.
Dec 28, 2008 2:03 PM
Now VCs are moving to Film Industry !!! Not a good indication. So many IT companies are dieing due to lack of funding…why they are not funding all these companies.
Jan 4, 2009 6:23 AM
http://shuhaib.com/2009/01/bollywood-portal-gets-5-million-in-venture-capital/
Jan 5, 2009 3:49 PM
Bad move, Bollywood is so crowded I do not know how this company will survive once they start paying content licencing fees to the licence holders, they will never own any IP for this content and therfore the tap can be turned off or made too expensive. Hungama owns most of this contnet as they have direct deals and can therfore create more exclusive content. I am more interested in some of the fusion type sites that own the content they create. India is building so much distribution there is little original content beyond bollywood which is owned by few companies.
Jan 26, 2009 3:20 AM
not a bad move i guess, chakpak is making its presence felt big time and is a very strong player online, an investor will invest where he sees potential returns - and this market can only get better
Jan 26, 2009 7:57 AM
i want to work with media industry…..................raj tripathi
mobile 9250376347
delhi
india
Jan 28, 2009 6:35 AM
I couldn’t agree more with pran above on this. Apart from the ownership of the content another key issue is that of the type of content these prtals are spewing. Its plain vanila happy go lucky kind of content on bollywood without any critical inputs or ratings of any sorts either from experts or film buffs or even any film club memebers etc.
Unless the “content-on-offer” gets differentiated it will be a very tough call for these portals to run shops in the long run. And sooner VC’s take note of this the better it will be for their monies…
Apr 13, 2009 2:29 PM
I think this move is just a plain and bland mixture of art and capitalism which will increase the incidence of inept art in movies. Shah Rukh khan also made this point in one of his interviews. All the best Bollywood.
May 5, 2009 2:07 AM
Seems like a pretty good bet . . .
May 10, 2009 1:20 AM
Chakpak.com is a top site that reaches over 202K US monthly people. the fastest growing Indian online entertainment community.