Seedfund Debuts With Investment In CarWale.com
Seedfund, the newly formed early-stage investment fund, has announced its first investment. It has taken close to a 30 per cent stake for an undisclosed sum in Automotive Exchange Pvt Ltd, the company behind CarWale.com. CarWale is an auto classifieds portal, and it also helps car buyers do research before they pick up their used or new car. Carwale is founded by Mohit Dubey.
Seedfund was launched on November 30, and its partners include Pravin Gandhi, Mahesh Murthy and Bharti Jacob. It has backing from investors like Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Ventures, Reliance Capital and SVB Financial Group, Sierra Ventures and individual investors like Kanwal Rekhi, K B Chandrasekhar, B V Jagadeesh and Sridar Iyengar.
A press statement from Seedfud claims that CarWale is the first VC-funded company in this space.
Mahesh Murthy, Managing Partner, Seedfund, said, “Indian car buyers are now offered more than 1000 trims across 125 car models today, making it really difficult to make a buying decision. People now are researching options before going to a dealership - and the web offers the best medium for comparing facts and opinions. Similarly, more than 60% of new car buyers are upgrades and every one knows how inefficient the Indian market is when it comes to trying to dispose off your old car. Sellers don’t have information on the right value for their car - and buyers don’t have much choice. CarWale.com identified this opportunity early and has quickly built a set of sophisticated tools for new car research and the largest specialized database of live listings in the used-car and new car .markets in India.”
Auto classifieds space is crowded with about half a dozen portals.
See our earlier stories:
It’s Rush Hour For Auto Portals
Will Auto Portals Work In India?
Posted In: Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Venture Capital
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Comments (13)
Dec 14, 2006 12:33 PM
Excellent! We need a competition for IndiaAutomobile.com run by BharatMatrimony which seems to be only serious player so far. The competition will drive features and benefit the customers.
Dec 14, 2006 2:16 PM
Good choice by seedfund.i have been following this company for quite some time now .i was wondering why no one big had invested in this comapny till date.its one of the meaningfull portals in india .they had all the stuff to make it a successfull company.
one more startup to watch out for is http://www.indyarocks.com,see
their blog at http://indyarocks.wordpress.com/.
what is happening at guruji.com- can any one comment-hmmmmmmmm
Dec 14, 2006 2:59 PM
i guess the game is not about being crowded.the games is about giving quality experience to the user of the portal.for example zapak being cash rich and also some what early entrant is unable to get good reviews because the site is down many times in a day and the games are just average.i mean that kind of is stuff is ok for a small start up but from relaiance -nah nah
whats intresting about carwale is the exhaustive content and a decent way of presentation.
pradeep,the name http://www.indyarocks.com sounds good.
Dec 15, 2006 3:59 AM
Hi Pradeep and Rajeev,
Thanks for your comments. We hope to live up to the expectations.
Your Team
@Indyarocks.com
Let’s Celebrate Life
Dec 15, 2006 5:33 AM
Its great news, however Mr. Murthy had been associated with Mohit Dubey, founder Carwale since over 6 months and had been an angel investor. Does carwale make any money at present? How do they plan to monetize their site?
Dec 15, 2006 6:31 AM
Carwale’s focus lies on new car information, how they plan to effectively monetize this since leads fr new cars are hard to come by. Most new car buyers approach dealerships directly and arent keen on filling up online forms which can sell their info to spammers. Used car classifieds is a more easily monetized prospect, some notable used auto classifieds sites:
http://www.indimoto.com
http://www.indiacar.com
http://www.indiaautomobile.com
Dec 15, 2006 6:52 AM
The problem with Mr murthy is that he plays god to people he knows. Geometric is his brother in law’s company, he know mohit for some years and pinstorm is his personal investment. Yet to see him invest in a non aligned - non mahesh camp venture.
I assume that Carwale will use Pinstorm to drive traffic and generate leads which will in turn go to the car manufacturers. Nice incestous deal
Dec 15, 2006 7:09 AM
What Pinstorm does is nothing great, they simply use adwords to generate traffic, anyone with some bit of research can get the right keywords and develop a adwords marketing strategy. I find Pinstrom a overhyped company which aims to target ignorant corporates who have no clue on how to use adwords effectively.
Dec 15, 2006 9:50 AM
Kalyan,
The word IndyaRocks may be a cool name, but you may want to use a different domain name.
Refer to the following WIPO case.
http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d2000-1489.html
Dec 16, 2006 4:43 AM
Folks ,
This is comin from a guy who (Once upon a time…) used to compete against pinstorm amongst other SEM agencies .......
couldnt help reacting to some of the comments made above ....
Yeah .....
SEM is all about gettin the right keywords ....
So why doest Ajay do it and make the bucks for himself and in the process donate a few to ‘save the racoon’ fund as well….
its very easy to have an anon name and take potshots at people who have tried doin better things than that ......
i dont know for a fact wether murthy invested in firms fronted by his friends and relatives ...
but does one have to be really based on ‘dharma’ to be a smart investor ?
at the end of the day even murthy’s got to account to whoever has entrusted him with the funds .......
have seen a lot of such muck thrown aroun on CS before…
Please stop using such public forums to take potshots….
Dec 18, 2006 12:51 AM
no one is taking pot shots at anyone. if stating facts is taking potshots then most blogs can be accused of doing the same. mr murthy is no saint and yes he is responsible now for his investors, but in the earlier times when he was with passion fund it was his own money. it is a known fact that none of his investments barring geodesic has been a success - geodesic went on to do a good IPO. Pinstorm is a privately held company where mr murthy and wife hold about 90%, some months ago mr murthy had done a song and dance of issuing esops to his team, despite that the top 25% of his founding team walked out to set mom and pop SEM companies.
the problem with mr murthy is that he used to be looked upto as an investor till he started mixing his personal kinks to his business. no problems with that too, but then its like that everywhere.
Feb 7, 2007 1:42 AM
check out http://www.autobasthi.com
This is also cool site.
Jan 17, 2008 1:14 PM
Another portal to be noted is CarSalesIndia.com