Quikr Raises Rs20 Crore In Round-Two Funding; Omidyar Network Comes Onboard As Investor

Pranay Chulet

Classifieds site Quikr.com today said it has raised Rs20 crore in second round funding from new investor Omidyar Network and returning investor Matrix Partners India. Original promoter ebay Inc. continues to be an investor.

Quikr started life in November 2005 as Kijiji.in, the Indian vertical of eBay’s global classifieds network Kijiji.com. “We gained traction across all metrics in a short span of time. Soon after, we realized that the horizontal classifieds space in India was not occupied and we could very easily be the leader in that space,” said Jiby Thomas, VP, marketing at Quikr, who has been with Kijiji India since the time the site was launched in India.

Quikr was formed subsequently and in January 2008, it accepted an undisclosed amount of investment from Matrix Partners India. In April this year, Pranay Chulet, a new media executive and entrepreneur, joined as CEO. Now eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) founder Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Network has invested in the company in a round that saw participation from Matrix Partners, but not Ebay. Matrix Partners was co-founded by Avnish Bajaj, who sold Baazee.com to eBay in 2004. With this round, eBay Inc.’s holding in Quikr would have got diluted but the company does not disclose the level of stakeholding by the investors.

Thomas said the site gets about 1.5 million unique visitors a month. He declined to discuss revenues but said the site had started monetization 2.5 years ago and will shortly be launching new streams of monetization such as paid listings.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post