ApnaPaisa Funding: $3.1mn, Significant shift in Business Model (shift from pure lead gen)
More on ApnaPaisa’s investment from Sequoia and Jafco.
Few reliable sources tell us that the investment is of the order of ~3.1mn$ (though not confirmed by Harsh, Founder & CEO of ApnaPaisa).
We had a quick chat with ApnaPaisa founder, Harsh Roongta and he mentioned that there is a significant change planned as far as ApnaPaisa’s business model is concerned – apart from getting into new categories, the company is also looking at different sources of revenues,
Lead generation is an outcome - there are different ways to achieve the same; and till date, ApnaPaisa has focused mainly on few channels (DSAs primarily) .
While lead generation is the primary source of revenue for ApnaPaisa, the company wants to get into price comparison space (across several consumer services categories)- which can open up lot of new source of revenues (referrals/transaction/lead generation/advertising etc). And this needs significant investment in technology/research – and that’s where the raised money will be used for.
Moreover, ApnaPaisa wants to get into more consumer services (and hence, needs to improve on the user experience, i.e. invest more in engg.)- has launched apnainvestment, and is getting into mobile space as well.
I believe, they will need to rebrand/reposition themselves and need to invest a significant amount in marketing as well.
What’s your opinion on ApnaPaisa’s roadmap?
Surely looks exciting – technically, more challenging compared to the current status of ApnaPaisa (and their companies).
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Interesting..whts cool is that they havent raised so much of money..
thats the good part of lead gen biz..
all the best to them for the 2.0 version.
An interesting read on the history and strategies of money portals in India. This article also outlines the next steps for a money portal.http://atomthought.com/?p=5
both seedfund’s Rupeetalk and sequoia’s Apnapaisa are the ones with the highest marketshare but the number of me too players in this market is growing at amazing rate i can count at least 20 others in the fray this group is interestingly the highest spender on google’s adwords I can see at least 30 ads for term credit cards if i click more
I just feel that Apnapaisa should have build and consolidated its financial products business. It was the the first mover in the Loan space and had smartly moved into Insurance. They were doing well but had still only scratched the surface of this industry. The growth could have come either from building a online wealth management business or from opening up new delivery channels other than internet for their existing services.
Price-Comparison for consumer products is not a very evolved category in India simply because its doable for products from online shopping portals which itself is a very small business.