Daily News Roundup: Canaan Partners, Worldfloat and More…

Canaan Partners to exit Bharatmatrimony, Iyogi, UnitedLex

Canaan Partners, the early stage venture investor will soon be exiting a few businesses. According to a report, it might be exiting Bharatmatrimony this year. Canaan, which had entered the Indian market in 2006 has made investments in companies like BharatMatrimony.com, Naaptol, and Iyogi among nine other startups. This will be the company’s second exit after it partially exited an enterprise and managed services startup called E4E.

Canaan holds 20% stake Bharatmatrimony.com, which had revealed its IPO plans last year.

Alok Mittal, MD at Canaan Partners said the Iyogi and UnitedLex are two other companies in its portfolio that have matured. “We might look at all options such as IPO or a secondary sale. But we can give out any specific numbers at this point in time,” he said.

Worldfloat may sell 10 percent stake to raise $50 million

Social networking site, Worldfloat, is looking to sell 10 percent stake to raise $50 Mn to expand its technologies at a larger scale and level. Worldfloat currently has about 50 Mn users, majority of them from India. The company is hopeful to get a valuation of about $500 Mn from VC funds.

In the coming six months it has plans to add about 30 new products. The site offers about lakh free movies online and a news search engine like Google news that shows the viral videos from all over the world along with an online university with computer and school courses.

Worldfloat has also recently launched the ecommerce feature taking on major players like OLX, Flipkart, and Snapdeal etc in discount deals market.

Snapdeal Launches TVC

This summer, Snapdeal.com has embarked on a new campaign to lure buyers to the site. At a time when people traditionally spend more on electronics, Snapdeal has designed, “The Summer Electronics Sale”, where customers can buy a wide range of appliances and electronics at heavily discounted prices. Items range from refrigerators and air conditioners to video game consoles and even washing machines.

To help promote this sale, Snapdeal has also created a brand new commercial illustrating the above. Written with a housewife as the protagonist, the commercial manages to capture the exasperation of the mother as she watches her family save to shop for new electronics. The advertisement manages to portray a simple fact- that people should save to spend wisely- quite beautifully. The advertisement is sure to resonate with middle class families that are neither too rich to buy extravagantly, nor too poor to play video games. In short, an advertisement for the urban class that is their main target audience.
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Will the advertisement appeal to the audience? We’ll have to wait and see.