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Online local information business is just getting hotter. Bangalore-based online local information company Four Interactive has raised $10 million in series B funding. The round is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and joined by Silicon Valley Bank and return backer Matrix Partners India. Matrix had invested $2 million in Series A round in the company about seven months ago.
Four Interactive runs AskLaila.com, an online service that provides information on food, events, lifestyle, shopping and so on. The company is building the content from scratch and making it available for search from its own database (instead of the world wide web). The content is supplemented by reviews too.
It's currently servicing Bangalore city, but plans to go to Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chennai in the next 12 months, according to Shriram Adukoorie, cofounder. In the long term, the company plans to cover 22 cities, which will be essentially the 80 per cent of India's internet penetration. Adds Kiran Konduri, the other cofounder, "We have built the engine. Now our focus is to build the business."
Konduri is a serial entrepreneur, who had set up and sold companies like Zephyr Software (to Infospace for $40 million) and Cogniti, Inc. Adukoorie is a veteran internet professional, and had set up MSN portal in six countries including India and South East Asia as a regional head for the company. Both have previously worked at Microsoft and Wipro.
Lightspeed's General Partner Jake Seid is joining the board as part of the Series B funding. Besides the founders, the board already has Rishi Navani of Matrix Partners India and Bejul Somaia, investor and entrepreneur, who was also part of the Series A investment.
Four Interactive is not the only well-funded company in this space. There are others like JustDial, a local directory search firm, which is a serious player with a robust database and currently an excellent online search platform. JustDial had received $8-10 million in series A funding from SAIF Partners, after which it raked in another $15 million from US-based Tiger Fund. Guruji.com, which got $7 million commitment from Sequoia Capital India, is a pure play search firm since its sources the directory content from Yellow Pages company Infomedia India, which itself is backed by private equity fund ICICI Venture. But the war for local information business is likely to shift online and mobile, and it remains to be seen who will win this and which model will work.

[See the Four Interactive team picture - from left to right: Kiran Konduri, Shriram Adukoorie, the co-founders, and Bal Krishn Birla, the CTO].

Also read: “There Is A Gap In The Correct And Actionable Local Information On The Net”