Daily Deal Site, Koovs Raises Funding From benefitsPLUS

Closed-group ecommerce site benefitsPLUS has invested in Koovs, Bangalore based daily deal site.

benefitsPLUS is a B2B player and works with corporates on their employee rewards/recognition programs. The Delhi based company creates and manages incentive, loyalty, privilege, reward and recognition solutions for brands, HR personnel, employees, dealers and distributors.

benefitsPLUS is foraying into B2C business and recently acquired snowball eRetail services. This investment in Koovs will probably give latter a foot-in-the-door in B2B segment, which is where a few niche deal sites (like open2save) operate.

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Vidteq Raises Funding From KITVEN

Bangalore based Vidteq has raised funding from KITVEN, a fund contributed by Karnataka State Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (KSIIDC), Karnataka State Financial Corporation (KSFC), Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) and Karnataka Bio-technology & Information Technology Services.

We have profiled Vidteq earlier (VidTeq – Video Maps for Bangalore [Fancy or Need?]) and the company has moved from being a pure B2C player to providing VideoMap based Navigation, Location and Search solutions for Businesses (like hotels/schools/colleges etc).

Started in 2008, the company plans to use the funds for enhancing its sales and marketing team and taking the Cell app to production.

KITVEN earlier invested $0.6 Million in Sloka Telecom.

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Classifieds Portal Quikr Raises $8 Million, Funding Round Led by Nokia Growth Partners

Quikr, a horizontal classifieds player, announced today the completion of a USD 8 million round for Quikr Mauritius (a holding company of Quikr India) led by new investor, Nokia Growth Partners (NGP), and returning investors, Norwest Venture Partners and eBay Inc.

Quikr offers a web and mobile based classifieds platform that addresses a wide variety of local needs in 40 cities across India. The company claims more than 10 million visitors continues to see rapid growth in the number of buyers and sellers on its platform.

Quikr's traffic-4 million UVs/Month

In the month of March, 2010, Quikr raised USD 6 million (led by NVP) and $4.5 million in July of 2009 (by Matrix Partners and Omidyar Networks). This takes the total fund raised to $18.5 million.

What’s your take on Quikr’s free ad posting model? Is it sustainable? Can they really rely on Google Adsense for monetization? Apart from adsense, the company also charges for lead generation to businesses, but is this model really worth more than $30 million in valuation (assuming Quikr’s valuation to be more than $30mn)?

What’s your opinion?

Must Read: The Broken Online Classified Services in India [And An Opportunity To Create Value]

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