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Billion dollar deals and everything below that marked a stellar year for Indian startups
2014 was a record year for Indian startups when it comes to venture capital funding.
Flipkart had a billion dollar funding round, which was matched twice over the very next day by rival Amazon (AMZN), who handed over a two-billion-dollar check to its Indian arm. Japan's Softbank then came in to bolster Snapdeal with two-thirds of a billion dollars.
Apart from ecommerce, it was the taxi apps Ola and TaxiForSure that were on a funding high in India to counter global player Uber, although they all ended the year on a regulatory low.
But there were other high-flyers like real estate portals Housing.com and CommonFloor, classifieds portal Quikr, food guide Zomato, and messaging app Hike. Data tech plays like Druva, Vizury, and AdNear too were hot this year.
Here's a look at the 30 highest funded Indian tech startups in 2014.
1. Flipkart – $1.91 billion
Ecommerce leader Flipkart became the first VC-backed company in India to have a billion dollar funding round. Tiger Global and South African media group Naspers led the $1 billion funding in July, which followed a $210 million round just two months earlier. And it rounded off the year with another $700 million from new investors. Part of the funds went into acquiring leading fashion portal Myntra. Three months before the merger, Myntra had raised $50 million. Tiger Global and Accel were the leading investors in both Flipkart and Myntra, and are believed to have pushed for the merger to shore up the battlefront against Amazon.
Flipkart says it aspires to be the Alibaba of India, in an obvious swipe at its main competitor Amazon from Seattle, USA, where Flipkart's founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal once worked as techies.
2. Snapdeal – $861 million
Snapdeal, headquartered in Delhi, is the main local rival to the Bangalore-based Flipkart. The eBay-backed startup raised $234 million in two back-to-back funding rounds in February and May, but still looked under-funded after Flipkart's billion-dollar funding round in July. Months of speculation followed on how Snapdeal would cope. Then Japanese telecom giant Softbank came to India in October with bagfuls of cash. And Snapdeal, whose co-founder Kunal Bahl was forced to leave the U.S. after studies because he could not get a work visa, got $627 million more in funding to play in the big leagues.
3. Ola – $251.5 million
On-demand taxi apps in India have hit a roadblock since the rape of a young woman in Delhi by an Uber driver. Until then, they were on a roll. The leading local player Ola had a whopping $627 million more in funding in October on top of the $41.5 million it had raised earlier in the year, taking its total funding in 2014 to over a quarter of a billion dollars. That gives it ammunition enough to compete with global rival Uber, provided India's transport regulators give them the green signal in the new year.
4. Quikr – $150 million
Tiger Global came on board to give a boost to local classifieds portal Quikr in its battle with global player OLX. Two funding rounds of $90 million and $60 million this year were a recognition of the continuing appeal of the online classified listing sites despite the mushrooming of ecommerce sites. From gadgets to secondhand household goods and jobs, the diverse offerings on this former subsidiary of eBay are heavily advertised on TV. Who will become the Craigslist f India? Maybe 2015 will tell.
5. Housing – $109 million
Real estate portal Housing.com was the third big beneficiary of Softbank's largesse in India, with a $90 million infusion of funds. This came on top of a $19 million funding round in June, taking its total for the year past the 100-million-dollar mark. Founded in 2012 by 12 young engineers from IIT Bombay, Housing.com has been a trail-blazer among Indian real estate portals, pioneering the use of map-based mobile technology to make house-hunting in a disorganized market easier.
