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http://www.indiatoday.intoday.in/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36126&Itemid=1&issueid=102§ionid=3&limit=1&limitstart=5
ARUN SAHLAM, CARWALE.COM, 31
“We have created a set of parameters which help people arrive at the fair value of their vehicle.”
If you are planning to buy a car and cannot make up your mind, chances are you haven’t visited Carwale.com. The portal has answers for all consumers’ needs.
Arun Sahlam
Born in a small town near Jabalpur, Arun Sahlam and his partners Gaurav Verma, 31, and Mohit Dubey, 35, understand the importance of empowering customers with relevant information through technology. Their first assignment was to manage the pre-owned car inventory for a used-car dealer in Mumbai.
They tried to connect all the dealerships with a web interface so that they could trade among themselves and serve customers with a better inventory. But no dealership used it.
They then decided to bring all the used car stock directly to car buyers. Thus was born Carwale.com. Says Sahlam: “Since car information was not available easily, we started offering comparisons and user reviews to empower our visitors.” By then, Rs 6 lakh had been invested in the venture, which was not making money initially. As traffic increased, automobile manufacturers began to advertise on the website. In just over three years, from being a pilot project, Carwale has turned into a profitable venture. It has won many awards, including the Red Herring Asia Top 100 and BusinessWeek’s Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs in Asia. In three years, Sahlam hopes to list the company once its revenues touch Rs 100 crore.
Success graph: Carwale has facilitated 10 million Indian car consumers and influenced approximately $3 billion worth of car transactions in the country.
—Malini Bhupta
Businessworld, a leading business weekly magazine conducted a jury survey of India’s most promising entrepreneurs and the next best ideas! The jury, made up of industry veterans – choose 5 entrepreneurs as “india’s most promising” and 4 as the “next best ideas”. We are proud that Vaatsalya, Carwale, Printo and redBus find mention in this list!
The detail story is available here – “Businessworld - In A League Of Their Own and “The Next-Best Ideas”
Endeavor is a global organisation that identifies entrepreneurs with innovative business models and high impact potential across emerging markets. Endeavor’s final shortlist of nominations from India had 4 entrepreneurs – 2 from Seedfund portfolio (Vaatsalya and redBus). And we are proud that the jury of Endeavor has selected Phani Sama of redBus, as the Endeavour India Entrepreneur of the Year. The detailed story can be found here .
In addition, www.carwale.com has been declared as the best site for automobiles by PC World – and by a huge margin!
When engineers Sumit Jain and Lalit Mangal left their software jobs last July to start their own social networking venture, they knew little about running a business
Namitha Jagadeesh
Mumbai: When engineers Sumit Jain and Lalit Mangal left their software jobs last July to start their own social networking venture, they knew little about running a business. By December, they were struggling to define their business model and faced a “serious financial crunch,” says Jain.
Then they met online DVD rental company Madhouse Media Pvt. Ltd co-founder Sameer Guglani at a start-up meet. For six months, Guglani worked closely with them on their core offering, commonfloor.com—an online community built around apartment complexes—and helped them raise funds. Instead of charging a fee, Guglani preferred some 8% stake in Jain and Mangal's venture.
 Angel investor: Sameer Guglani of Madhouse Media Pvt. Ltd.
Morpheus Venture Partners , the firm Guglani has since set up with Madhouse co-founder Nandini Hiriannaiah, has worked with three start-ups so far, including blogging platform Instablogs Inc. and catering site Foodathome.in. It is now shortlisting five from a pool of 15 start-ups.
Morpheus represents a new breed of venture firms in India that focus on the bottom rung of start-ups, some without even a business plan. From deciding on a name to negotiating funding, these firms want to help start-ups tide over their earliest growth pangs.
Inspired by the US venture firm that pioneered the mentoring model in 2005, Y Combinator , Indian counterparts such as Morpheus and New Delhi-based Opdrage Venture Partners are getting involved with start-ups at an early stage, before seed-stage funds or boutique investment banks.
Y Combinator, which typically invests less than $20,000 (Rs864,000) for small stakes of between two and 10%, works with start-ups in batches and has funded 102 ventures.
In India , where individual angel investors are few, firms such as Morpheus and Opdrage, offer start-ups mentorship and aim to create a pipeline of fundable start-ups for investors. With angel firms such as Accel India Venture Fund (formerly Erasmic Venture Fund) and Seedfund raising larger second funds, the firms expect the gap between starting out and getting funded will widen—increasing the demand for their services.
“There is enough seed money available in India waiting for quality start-ups,” says Kris Nair, founder, Opdrage Ventures. “We want to be an entrepreneur cooperative.”
Nair, a founding member of Satellier Inc., a Sequoia Capital -funded building information modelling start-up, set up Opdrage six months ago, mixing mentoring with investment banking deals. The firm is working with six ventures, including software application company APIster, furniture design store Cubicle One and a modelling start-up that is yet to be named.
Firms such as Morpheus and Opdrage today invest little or no money in the start-ups they mentor but plan to raise funds at a later stage. Opdrage has invested a maximum of Rs400,000, while Morpheus has no capital investment. “We're looking to either raise a fund of $2-3 million or tie up with partners for initial funding of our portfolio companies,” says Guglani.
Venture firm Mentor Partners , an early example of the mentorship model in India , began with consulting for a fee but later raised its own fund.
August 29th, 2007
Yesssss! This is certainly THE news
of the moment! It was great to be in the top
two-hundred, but this - the inclusion in the top
hundred - is a feeling that we cannot even begin
to describe.
Red
Herring, ascribed with titles like “Bible of
Silicon Valley” and “investment vein”, is a
global economic media corporation with
credentials that reach the skies. The world of
innovation and entrepreneurship are transforming
the look of business these days. Red Herring
investigates this on a global scale and
appreciates the business outfits which are
making their presence felt by a good
measure.
CarWale.com has, since its
inception, been dedicated towards delivering the
best services to the users/consumers. It is this
dedication and the contribution of our users
that has seen achieve this significant feat! Had
it not been for your support, we would not be
seeing this day.
One
of the top hundred companies in the Asian
continent - ah, the words when given the vocal
form, sound like symphony to our ears. It is an
achievement that all the infant companies would
love to have in their report
cards!
Mohit Dubey, our CEO, was in
HongKong to
experience the news first-hand. He called us up
after the declaration and his tone of excitement
was reminiscent of an elated teenager! It is
this enthusiasm that we share with our users,
and it is this enthusiasm that has seen us
strive so hard to better
ourselves.
This news has given us an
additional, dynamic dose of adrenaline rush and
we will push the envelope to get past our own
set benchmarks. There are high levels of
energies filling up this room as I write this
piece. The determination and dedication can
literally be felt on everyone’s face. Check out
this official
declaration from Red
Herring.
The
faith and support you guys have shown in us has
driven us thus far, and will continue to drive
us beyond the horizon. We seek your blessings.
Cheers to all!
http://www.herringevents.com/asia07/redherring100.html#100
After a difficult evaluation process, the Red
Herring editorial team has selected Automotive
Exchange Pvt. Ltd. as one of the 100 winners of
the Red Herring 100 Asia awards 2007 and for
being the most promising companies in Asia.
http://www.mouthshut.com/review/Redbus.in-130725-1.html
Online bus-ticketing portal eyes North India; will also offer services through mobile phones by end of the month
Archana Rai, archana.r@livemint.com
Bangalore
http://www.livemint.com/2007/09/09201920/Enterprising-trio-takes-redBus.html?atype=tp
In
January, 2002, when the Indian Railways launched
an online portal to hawk tickets, the move was
met with loads of scepticism. There were plenty
of teething troubles with tickets often failing
to get delivered on time, recalls Amitabh
Pandey, the brain behind the Internet ticketing
service of the world’s largest railway network
by passengers. However, a transparent
reimbursement policy helped win the trust of
customers and today the railways’ ticketing site
at www.irctc.co.in is the
busiest in the country and turned in Rs350 crore
ticket sales in
2007.
Five and a half years
later, a bunch of entrepreneurs are trying to
replicate the railway tickets initiative in a
bigger, and much more fragmented, travel
market—long distance bus services. Some nine
billion tickets are sold each year, in
India,
on routes connecting cities, towns and
villages—about 50% more than the tickets sold on
the railways.
There is no accurate
estimate of the value of all such tickets, but
advance bookings are worth Rs15,000 crore,
estimates Phanindra Sama, who in an earlier
avatar as a chip designer, has spent five years
at the Indian units of ST Microelectronics NV
and Texas Instruments
Inc.
Today, as chief executive
of start-up Pilani Soft Labs Pvt. Ltd, which
runs redBus, an online bus-ticketing portal
(redbus.in) that links 135 bus operators to
customers in southern and western
India,
Sama is chipping at that market.
Since it started up, redBus
has sold some Rs2.5 crore worth of tickets, and
is averaging 400 booked tickets a day now, says
Sama. In December, the peak month for
long-distance bus-ticket sales, redBus expects
that number to ratchet up to 1,200 daily. About
7% of redBus’ bookings are made on by phone and
the rest, online.
Set up by Sama and two
college buddies—Sudhakar Pasupunuri, an
International Business Machines Corp. alumnus,
and Charan Padmaraju, formerly with Honeywell
International India Pvt. Ltd—from Birla
Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani in
Rajasthan, redBus intends to expand to North
India from the southern and western markets,
where it has been establishing operations until
now and has covered 2,000 destinations. With a
commitment of $1 million or Rs4.1 crore capital
from Seed Fund, an early-stage venture capital
firm in February this year, redBus will, later
this month, offer customers the facility to book
and pay for bus tickets on their mobile
phones.
Sama plans to focus on just
bus tickets—except, perhaps, for insurance for
low budget travellers—and not expand into other
segments such as railway and airline tickets.
“The idea is to use
technology to aggregate the fragmented service
providers in the bus transport space onto a
single platform for the consumer,” said Bharti
Jacob, partner at Seed Fund. According to a
study commissioned by redBus, the value of bus
tickets sold by both state-run and private
transport operators in the four southern states
and Maharashtra adds up to Rs6,000 crore. “At
least a tenth of those booking are now made
online, giving us (an addressable) market of
around Rs600 crore,” said
Sama.
Until now, redBus hardly
employed tech on the back-end with bus
operators. It blocks ‘ticket-inventory’ at
different operators and sells them—similar to
how offline ticketing agents work. But, says
Sama, that will change in the next month when it
links up with operators ABT Ltd, KPN Travels Ltd
and VRL Logistics Ltd, all of who have
computerized systems for ticket management. Even
state road transport corporations, which don’t
have an online ticketing presence or whose
servers cannot handle traffic surges, are open
to partnering with redBus, Sama
says.
It helps that bus operators
view online ticketing as a low-cost means to win
and retain customers. “Online sales account for
about 15% of bus tickets sold on our luxury bus
routes,” said N. Shanmugasundaram, chief
executive of ABT, a Rs500-crore travel services
operator in southern India that uses
redBus.
Others are starting up
online bus ticketing operations, too. While
electronic ticketing for railway and airline
tickets has taken off in the last few years, bus
transport is emerging as the fastest growing
online segment, says Ashwini Kakkar, chairman of
Via, a travel services company. Earlier this
year Via, formerly Flight Raja, raised $5
million of venture funding from NEA-Indo US
Ventures and changed its name to reflect a
multi-product portfolio that included online bus
ticketing, travel insurance, cruise liner
bookings as also e-ticketing for
airlines.
The next six months will
see other travel portals entering online bus
ticketing, say industry insiders. Travel portal
yatra.com has just added online bus ticketing to
its portfolio.
As connectivity improves on
the country’s highway network with 6,000km of
four-lane highways being added under the Golden
Quadrilateral project, passenger traffic is
expected to grow by 15%, according to the
department of road transport and highways. Says
Via’s Kakkar, formerly a chairman of Thomas
Cook’s India business, who expects bus ticketing
to emerge as the largest volume segment in the
travel services industry in the coming years,
“If I can reach Goa from Mumbai in five hours on
a dual carriageway road, even I would prefer to
take a bus.”
K.P. Narayana Kumar contributed to this story.
http://www.pluggd.in/2007/10/interview-with-phanindra-ceofounder-of-redbus-in-an-indian-startup
redBus.in is an interesting service that e-enables bus
ticketing across major states in India.
I must say that redBus.in is a gutsy attempt to
e-enable a low-margin service which is highly
fragmented as well as offline (how many bus
operators know about
Internet?)
Here is presenting our interview with
Phanindra, CEO/co-founder of redBus.in. What’s
really amazing about these guys is that the
entire founding team is very
young and have taken
up a huge challenge (and I am sure this
interview will inspire those who are still
wondering whether to startup or
not!)
If you have
questions/comments/feedback for Phani, please
leave them in the comments
section.
Please tell us more
about RedBus.in and the services you
offer.
redBus is India’s
first organized bus ticket booking service. With
services in 15 states, sales offices in 6
locations and daily departures in 2800 routes,
we are India’s
largest aggregator of bus
tickets.
Below are our USPs.
1.
Customers can
choose their seat – facility which is unique:
none of airliners / railways offer this
facility.
2.
Customers can book
return tickets – facility not available at the
traditional brick and mortar agents.
3.
Multiple bus
operators.
4.
Standard fares.
Please tell us
about the founding team (educational
background/work-ex
etc.)
redBus is founded by 3 of us.
Sudhakar, Charan and
me.
Sudhakar – 26, B.E (Hons) EEE from
BITS-Pilani, 4 yrs exp. at IBM, Bangalore.
Charan – 27, B.E(Hons.) EEE, M.Sc
(Hons) Physics from BITS-Pilani, 3 yrs exp. at
Honeywell, Bangalore.
Phani – 27, B.E(Hons) EEE from
BITS-Pilani, 4 yrs at Texas Instruments,
Bangalore.
Why did you pick
the bus ticketing domain (given that
airfare/train fare is relatively cheap - and the
online reservation is primarily done by IT crowd
(with surplus cash)). Do you see this as a huge
volume
business?
redBus is an organized bus ticketing
service provider. We are not just OTAs. We have
other channels like home delivery, ticket
distribution partners like Sify iWays etc., We
are working on improving the customer experience
while he books a bus ticket – an industry which
has never been considered seriously by anyone
till now inspite of bus being an everyweek
necessity.
Given a choice, people (IT as well as
non-IT) will opt for convenience – especially if
it comes at no extra cost! Infact we are seeing
that the customers started demanding eg., if the
response to a ‘customer request’ is more than 4
hours, he cribs. This is very encouraging
J
As people get used to convenience, the
volumes will grow. It is definitely a huge
volume business with 1+ billion customers –
considering that all Indians travel by bus
atleast once in a
year.
Even bus service
providers (like KSRTC) have their own outlets
(and sites) - where do you see RedBus has a
differentiator.
KSRTC going online is not competition
to us. We are not a OTA. Our website is one of
the options we have for our customers. We
provide a whole new ticket reservation
experience to our customers including multiple
bus operators (KSRTC as well as private busses),
a variety of departure times, fares etc,. which
gives us competitive
advantage.
What’s your target
market?
I know I can’t say that we are
targeting everyone J ! But we receive very good
sales from IT crowd on the web. Most of the
calls at our call center are from home makers
and elderly who look for predictable quality of
service. And the sales through our partner
networks cater to business men who travel by bus
on business trips.
How do you guys get
the real time seat availability information from
service
providers?
Most of the bus operators are not
computerized. Hence there is problem in getting
real time inventory from
them.
Our model is similar to that of hotel
inventory. We block about 10% of the inventory
in all busses of our partners till 1 hour before
the departure time. Some of our partners are
computerized now and we are taking webservices
from them.
What are the
challenges you see with the current state of the
Industry?
The misconception of low entry barrier
in what we are doing seems to be a problem.
After we started, a lot of other people also
started similar services – may be with the
understanding that all it takes is just a
website and partnership with bus operators.
Today you can find atleast 25 websites offering
bus tickets in India!
Some of them have been undercutting
prices, doing variable pricing, changing the
commission structure etc.,. The absolute
commission per ticket being very small, it is
really a high volume game. Without reaching a
critical number, any of these undercutting does
not work. It would just be sprinkling the VC
money in the market. I personally feel that the
industry is not ready for any such things right
now.
These are some of the temporary yet
painful challenges.
Please share some
of your future plans. What are your plans w.r.t
PAN India
presence?
We are looking at 3 more locations by
the end of this year. These locations will put
us PAN India pretty much. Currently, with our
offices at 6 locations we cater to about 15
states.
In future, do you
see RedBus having an offline ticketing
system/kiosk?
Yes. Very much. We are planning it
out.
Please share a few
key learnings/experience after starting
up.
It is completely a different world we
live after we start on our own. Things change
everyday and we have to keep up with every
change. One of the key learning that I have had
is that it is a must to have a well
experienced advisory board, atleast for first
generation
entrepreneurs. I am
surprised at the number of occasions where we
could have made wrong decisions otherwise. Today
where ever we stand, it is because of the timely
mentorship of our mentors and
investors.
You guys started up
at a very early age: your tips to wannabe
entrepreneurs who are still holding
back?
I would say that entrepreneurship,
unlike any other traditional profession does not
need a definitive skill set. What I mean is, to
get into TI (my prev. company) one needs to know
about transistors, voltage, current etc.,
similarly to do software, one needs to know
oracle, java etc,.
But for entrepreneurship, one just
needs to have a strong will power and a good
advisory board J I have met so many
entrepreneurs who just wanted to do what they
want to do and they get every other skillset in
the market. It is not necessary that one needs
to know internet technology to start an internet
based company.
So go head and start your venture.
Everything will fall in place, if you have the
will power.
Sulekha.com teams up with
India’s
Auto portal CarWale.com to empower its visitors
with better car buying and selling
decisions.
Sulekha.com, India’s largest Classifieds
and Yellow Pages online destination, today
announced a partnership with CarWale.com to
deliver great content, user friendly and a
simplified car buying experience to its
visitors. The new auto channel will be live by
end of October
2007.
Sulekha.com
announced it has entered into an alliance with
CarWale.com
India’s leading automotive portal for latest
information on Indian cars that empowers
Sulekha.com members and its visitors by
providing comprehensive car research and
decision making
tools.
Sulekha.com
manages the largest car and bike Classifieds
with thousands of listings. CarWale car value
will now help Sulekha.com users to check the
value of their car before listing it for sell at
Sulekha.com auto classified. CarWale.com is the
first and only Indian portal offering free
online Car Valuation. Its valuation guide is
referred for over one million valuations in last
one year.
In addition
Sulekha.com visitors can take advantage of On
Road price quote, which is already one of the
most used service at CarWale.com. Visitors can
get the on road price of any car, any make any
model across country for free.
About
Sulekha.com
Sulekha.com is India’s
largest Classifieds and Yellow Pages destination
with a highly popular member-generated community
and social/professional networking hub
integrated with local commerce. Over 4 million
Indians from around India and the world use
Sulekha’s Local Commerce (Classifieds and Yellow
Pages) verticals of Real Estate, Autos, Jobs,
Tours/Travels, Personal Finance,
Coaching/Training and Social Media verticals of
Blogs, Movies, Travel, Food, Finance and News.
Sulekha.com has city specific portals covering
25 cities across the world with offices in
Austin, Chennai,
Bangalore,
Delhi, Hyderabad and
Mumbai.
About
CarWale.com
CarWale.com
is the India’s
leading automotive portal, providing content and
tools to empower car consumers take better
buying and selling decision. It has India’s
largest used car stock of more than 12000 cars
available for sell. It’s the first and only
place to get online used car valuation and new
car price for any make, model across India.
CarWale.com is venture capitalist funded company
by India’s
leading VC Seedfund.
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