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Intel Capital Invests $17M In Yatra.com, BuzzInTown And An OOH Firm

By Madhav A Chanchani

  • 20 Aug 2008

Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of chipmaker Intel Corp, has announced that it would invest $17 million into three Indian companies - which includes travel portal Yatra.com, events-oriented social networking portal BuzzInTown.com, and Emnet Samsara Media Pvt. Ltd., an out-of-home advertising firm focusing on the Indian public transportation market. How much has gone into each company is not disclosed.

Yatra.com CEO and founder Dhruv Shringi told

VC Circle
that this is the third round of investment in the company. He, however, declined to reveal the quantum of the investment. The first two rounds of investments were done by Norwest Venture Partners, Reliance Technology Ventures and TV18 Group.
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The investment in Yatra is a late stage investment from Intel Capital. The funding will be used to accelerate business growth, upgrade technology to add new products and features to their website and fund potential acquisition. Yatra aims to become a full service provider and gain from increasing volume-based incentives. The travel portal is also planning to venture into cross sell opportunities in various market segments such as corporate travel, leisure, online travel bookings and hotel bookings.

In the case of BuzzInTown, a community oriented site which helps users discover local events in major Indian cities, this could be Series A. It is a entertainment-oriented social network extensible across web and mobile platforms and provides opportunities for viral networking across markets such as live events, media, advertising services, sales, and others. BuzzInTown was founded in 2007 by Uday Bellary and Dr. Amitabh Saran and is promoted by Wortal Inc. It currently has presence in 10 cities and plans use the funds to expand its affiliations in 30 more cities, enable media and Internet delivery of content, and for increasing site traffic.

Emnet Samsara Media Pvt. Ltd, an OOH media company targeted at public transportation company, joins a list of OOH media companies such as Laqshya, LiveMedia, and DSN that got funded by venture capital firms. Emnet Samsara is headquartered in Mumbai and is headed by Suyash Chaini. The firm is involved in application of technology to explore advertising potential by creating innovative media platforms to reach target advertising audiences, such as in the field of public transportation. The company plans to use these funds to expand its operations.

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