Sulekha.com receives $10mn Funding From Norwest Venture Partners
Norwest Venture Partners has invested $10 mn in one of the oldest Indian community portals – Sulekha.com (according to this release). The funding will be used for business development and for offering new services both online and on mobile. Sulekha has blogs, social networking, classifieds, events, yellow pages, among other services. This is Sulekha’s first institutional round of funding. Promod Haque, managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners has joined Sulekha’s board of directors.
Given the amount of money chasing Web 2.0 (I define it as the participatory business model) in India, I suppose Sulekha was bound to get funded. I never found Sulekha very usable (what with all the popups they had and the banners they still do), but they do have a dedicated userbase. Traction, as they call it, is critical to funding, as was repeated often at TiEcon Delhi 2006.
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Its one of the crap site with full of popups I have ever seen ….
Hey Jay…that means they are like The Times Of India News Paper…..very healthy in revenue.
Keech
there are much better sites to sulekha…web 2.0 is all about users, but sulekha took them users for granted and pumps out tons of ads on the face of user…crappiest site i ever visited
i like http://www.mouthshut.com, http://www.desihub.com etc. which are upcoming with better UI
I am surprised with this development. Sulekha has no value offering, and is a very poor quality site. I guess the VC are also getting pressurised now….
I agree with everyone that Sulekha isnt a user friendly site and not at all on the Web 2.0 platform. But at the same time they have their fingers in many pies and have recently made an ad network too which will server CPC ads across Sulekha's online properties (and maybe have a publisher network too).
Yes Anil, it has its fingers in many pies but is that a good thing or a bad thing? I have followed this site for some time, they take initiatives and then dont execute properly to the extent that some of the initiatives die prematurely. They started a matrimonial service that lasted less than 6 months, very recently. Since there was some traction in real estate, they started a real estate website but I dont see anything happening there.
Anyway, maybe they needed money to pull all these stunts and maybe we see something worthwhile. All in all, its fuelling the online space.
Sulekha, should scrap their CPC network too and start adding adsense to get any revenue,
They should first do a R&D before launching any new products and sould do further research in their AD network
no it good website just need some update and modification
no it good website just need some update and modification
regards
http://www.tendertiger.com
prasad
no it in nascent stage it will be good after some time