Deal Radar 2008: Yatra

Yatra is a travel company which provides availability and booking facilities for air travel, hotels, buses and car rentals worldwide. Besides its strong online presence, Yatra also offers its services through mobile phone and retail mediums. Founded by Dhruv Shringi, Manish Amin and Sabina Chopra in 2006, the company currently is based in 10 cities

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Travel Ad Network Raises Series A

Travel Ad Network (TAN), the largest vertical ad network in travel, just closed a $15 million Series A round of financing led by Rho Ventures, Village Ventures and individual investors. And what a Series A it is! $50-$75 Million valuation, estimated in my deal radar post and commensurate with the trends in the industry set

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Vertical Ad Networks: Evolution

Another big funding round in the vertical ad network world: FM raises between $40 and $50M from Oak Investment Partners. Valuation: $200 Million; 2007 Revenue: $25 Million; 2008 Revenue Forecast: $60 Million. Not bad!

Deal Radar 2008: Kosmix+Adify – Potential Google Challenger

Kosmix is a vertical portal startup. Founded in 2006 by Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, founders of Junglee, this site aims at creating a ‘Home page for every topic’. Featured Kosmix sites are RightHealth, RightAutos and RightTrips focusing on health, autos and travel verticals. They have also been working on other verticals like politics, finance,

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 4)

SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? What is your business model? CL: We’ve reviewed a great deal of research on how large the market is for online travel advertising and very specifically banner advertising on travel websites. Forrester says that online travel advertising is an $8-billion-a-year industry in 2007, growing

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Deal Radar 2008: Retrevo

For the moment, this will be my last Vertical Search Engine on the deal radar, while we turn the spotlight onto other segments. We have discussed TheFind and Wize. Today we will take a look at Retrevo, another shopping search engine. We had profiled Vipin Jain, CEO Retrevo last year. Retrevo is a product review

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Trend Radar 2008: Verticalization Everywhere

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know, I am a huge believer in verticalization of the web. In fact, my entire Web 3.0 thesis is based on this idea. In 2007, we saw the beginnings of verticalization. In 2008, I expect this trend to become rampant in all aspects of the

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Deal Radar 2008: TheFind

We profiled Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind.com, a discovery shopping search engine last year. This is yet another vertical search engine optimized for visual merchandising oriented lifestyle products. In July 2007, TheFind raised $15 million in a third round of funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Ignition, Lightspeed and Redpoint. It had previously raised $11 million

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