VCCircle

Picsquare CEO Manish Agrawal has confirmed the deal with Ahmedabad-based Infibeam to VCCircle.

Bangalore based photo printing portal Picsqure has been sold to Indian online retail firm Infibeam. Picsquare CEO Manish Agrawal has confirmed the deal to VCCircle. He, however, refused to divulge the financial details nor commented whether it was a cash or stock deal.

VCCircle was the first to report about the deal betweem Infibeam and Picsquare on Monday. The Bangalore-based Picsquare will now be a subsidiary of Infibeam and will continue to operate as a stand alone website. Also Agrawal refused to comment if the current investors are exiting the company. Agrawal and his co-founder Kartik Jain will continue their present roles in Picsquare. 

Agrawal said that the deal has nothing to do with the slowdown and Picsquare continues to grow. "We thought this is a good opportunity to work togetther and make something big in this space," said Agrawal. Picsquare now plans to add more features to the website, expand it's product selection and team. There are synergies between Picsquare and Infibeam in terms of knowledge sharing and customers.

Previous story posted on Monday (17/11/08): The economic slowdown seems to have started having an impact on India's web 2.0 startups. Bangalore-based online photo printing company Picsquare is believed to be in advanced stages of talks to sell to online retail firm Infibeam. When contacted by VCCircle, Manish Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of Picsquare, neither confirmed nor denied the development to VCCircle. "It will be too early to comment on this development," he later called to say.

Picsquare, besides offering services like printing photos, also personalised mugs, t-shirts, mousepads, calendars etc. Formed in 2005, it has a total user base of 2 lakh and a team of 11 people.

In 2006, Picsquare raised $75,000 from three angel investors - Sanjay Swami, CEO of mCheck, Shripati Acharya, founder of Snapfish and Vijay Iyer, Vice President of Strategic Alliances, Silver Creek Systems Inc. Then, in August this year, it also roped in a strategic partner, Bhola Digital Lab, an offline photo printing company. The company is currently in the growth stage and is expanding its operations.

Ahmedabad-based Infibeam sells products via internet, which includes new and used automobiles, mobiles and accessories, books, cameras, watches, gifts, toys and home appliances. It's founder and CEO is Vishal Mehta. 

This is not the first M&A in this space. Earlier this year Hewlett & Packard-owned online photo printing site Snapfish.com acquired an Indian online photo printing website MeraSnap.com.

There are a lot of players in online photo printing space, and quite a few have raised funding. One of the oldest photo portals is ZoomIn, which is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Sherpalo Ventures. Printo is another one to receive funding from Sequoia Capital and Seed Fund. Banglore-based Canvera raised Series A funding in May this year from Footprint Ventures, DFJ and others. There are also other players like eYaadien and Photomasti.

Then personalised merchandising firms such as Myntra and eYantra also overlap this field as they also personalised merchandises.