Mumbai-based JustDial, which runs an India-specific local business listings site, has raised $10 million from Sequoia Capital Global Equities and SAP Ventures, the company said on Monday.
This comes as a fresh round of investment from Sequoia. In mid-2009, Sequoia Capital India had picked up a little over 10 percent stake from an early investor in JustDial for Rs 40 crore.VCCircle was the first to report that SAP Ventures was investing $7.5 million for a 1.5 per cent stake in JustDial.
SAP Ventures is the corporate venture capital arm of enterprise software behemoth SAP AG and has invested in iYogi Technical Services (remote-computer tech support for consumers and small businesses), Newgen Software Technologies (outsourced engineering) and Connectiva Systems Inc. (software vendor to communications service providers) in India.
JustDial was founded by VSS Mani in 1994, and has B2C and B2B listings of small and medium business advertisers in India. It allows users to get information on the listings over various media - the internet, the call centre, mobile internet and print. The company raised its first round of VC funding from SAIF Partners to the tune of Rs 50 crore in 2006 and in 2007, raised Rs 77 crore from Tiger Global Management.
Its business model involves charging a local business a listing fee which can range between Rs 3,000 and a few lakhs. The service is free for consumers. The company has a presence in 240 cities with 3.5 million listings and 25 million users.
Competitors to JustDial are OLX.in (backed by Nexus venture Partners), Infomedia18's Yellow Pages, Quikr (backed by Nokia Growth Partners), AskLaila by Four Interactive (which is backed by Lightspeed, Matrix and SVB) and Sulekha (Norwest Venture Partners, Indigo Monsoon).
