Google Capital invests in Girnar Software, owner of Indian auto portal CarDekho.com

Girnar Software, which runs several auto portals in India including CarDekho.com, has raised an undisclosed amount of new funding from Google Capital, with participation from returning investor Hillhouse Capital.

This is the fourth Indian startup Google Capital has invested in (its portfolio also includes Freshdesk, Commonfloor, and Practo).

Before this round, Girnar Software had already raised at least $80 million. In addition to CarDekho.com, Girnar Software runs car classifieds sites Gaadi.com and Zigwheels.com, former competitors which it acquired in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and motorbike marketplace BikeDekho.com.

Girnar Software expanded its auto portal business internationally last March with the launch of CarBay.com, which operates in 25 countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, North America, and South America.

The company plans to continue growing overseas with its latest funding by making acquisitions, founder and CEO Amit Jain tells TechCrunch. In its home market, Girnar Software’s sites targets Indian car sellers and buyers with value-added services, like insurance, car accessories, tires, and roadside assistance.

According to a study by Japanese financial firm Nomura, India’s auto market is expected to grow 15.6 percent this year, nearly five times faster than the global growth rate. Factors fueling car ownership include larger salaries and pending tax changes that might make buying a vehicle cheaper.

CarDekho differentiates from rivals with technology like 360-degree of car interior and exteriors, audio recordings of horns, engines, and ignition, and virtual reality showrooms. The goal is to “ensure that the consumer gets an immersive experience of the car model he’s considering before he even visits a dealer showroom,” says Jain. It will improve its platform by investing some of its new funding into research and development.

In a press statement, Google Capital partner David Lawee said, “We’re very excited to be investing in Girnar Software, the parent company of Idia’s leading auto portal, CarDekho.com. The team is led by savvy entrepreneurs with a strong product orientation, who have positioned the company perfectly in a rapidly growing market.”

Comments

The EHang 184 Is A Human-Sized Drone Taking Off At CES

We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff on day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company EHang . Yes you heard right — a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down to the size of a LEGO and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was shrunk, and the giant flying machine was sitting smack in the middle of the CES drone section. EHang, which was founded in 2014 and has raised about $50M in venture fundingto date, was pretty gung-ho about telling everyone at CES that the 184 was the future of personal transport. And for the most part, people were too in awe to question them. But the reality is that the company probably was using the 184 as more of a marketing tool for their standard-sized drones like the Ghost . Not that we’re saying that the 184 will never be a real thing, just that it probably isn’t co...

Western Union Brings Money Transfer And Its Tricky Fees To Chat Apps

Remittance has always been a shady business. Migrant workers need to send money they earn home to their families, but get hit with fine print fees so less cash comes out the other side than they might assume. Remittance companies earn extra by keeping the margin between their own made up exchange rate and the real one. Western Union is the best known remittance company, with 500,000 brick-and-mortar locations around the world. But tech startups like TransferWise, Azimo, and WorldRemit are gunning for the business. They hope to increase convenience and reduce fees to lure customers away from Western Union, Moneygram, and other old-school remittance providers. So Western Union is going digital thanks to partnerships with big messaging apps. It launched its Western Union Connect system in October last year, followed by a partnership with WeChat for sending up to $100. Now it’s getting into bed with Viber , which has over 664 million “unique” users, thou...

NVBOTS Wants To Make 3D Printers As Easy As Toasters

Right now 3D printing curriculums, if they exist, are fairly sparse. Putting a two thousand dollar machine in front of a grade schooler usually ends up in a lot of 3D printed Yoda heads and not much education while the learning curve for most 3D design tools is steep. That’s what the founders of NVBOTS, AJ Perez, Forrest Pieper, Christopher Haid, and Mateo Peña Doll, are looking to solve. Their product, the NVPRO , is a 3D printer with a few interesting features. The two most interesting are the automatic removal system which pops parts off of the build plate when they are done and a built-in print server that allows you to print from any device. This means you can run large batches of prints from different users with each part popping off as its printed. This means a class of students can send jobs to a printer and then pick them up just as they would a laser printer. The printer also supports a central “admin” who can check jobs before they are printed as and offers a ...

Smart savings app Clinc is a new fintech startup from ex-CEO and founder of Numbrs

Last April, Julien Arnold quietly left his role as CEO of Numbrs, the mobile-first banking app he co-founded with Swiss company builder Centralway. Now, almost a year on, he’s on the verge of launching his next project: Clinc , a mobile app to make it easier to save money for a future purchase or financial rainy day. Using what Arnold describes as a “dynamic intelligence algorithm,” Clinc promises to track your current account spending and analyse the results to find the optimum amount to save each month, which is then automatically deposited into your Clinc savings account underpinned by the startup’s partner bank. The secret sauce, which he won’t go much into detail on, is that the app is dynamic, able to make on-the-fly adjustments to how much you transfer to your savings account based on how your spending has changed or are predicted to change. In other words, Clinc’s central proposition is to help you achieve your financial goals faster. “This is the bigges...

Following Patent Deal, Every Time Apple Sells An iPhone, Ericsson Gets A Bit Of Money

Telecommunications infrastructure company Ericsson just announced that it has reached an agreement with Apple over an ongoing patent dispute. For the next seven years, Apple will pay a fraction of its iPhone and iPad profit to Ericsson in royalties. Back in February, Ericsson filed suits in many different jurisdictions for patent infringement (the International Trade Commission, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, as well as courts in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands). According to the Swedish company, Apple has been violating 41 patents over the past few years with its iPhone and iPad, in particular patents related to GSM, UMTS and LTE technologies. As expected, the two companies have reached an agreement and Ericsson is dropping all of its lawsuits. Today’s news isn’t particularly surprising as Ericsson holds more than 35,000 patents. Many of them are related to wireles...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog