mKhoj raises $7.1mn from KPCB, Sherpalo

April 13, 2008

By sinha

Mobile ad network, mKhoj has raised $7.1mn from KPCB and Sherpalo Ventures.

mKhoj’s (read the earlier coverage) journey has been quite an interesting one – they started off as a mobile local deals player, but saw real success in their advertising platform.

mKhoj earlier raised seed round from Mumbai Angels – a fact we were aware of, but never really wrote about it, since Amit personally didn’t confirm to me.

$7.1 mn is a big money and bringing in reputed VCs like KPCB is definitely a validation of mKhoj’s execution.

KPCB, quite lately is very bullish about the mobile advertising/payment market and has even launched iFund, a $100mn fund dedicated to iPhone apps!

Mobile advertising is gaining traction in India and given the penetration, advertisers are looking for innovative solutions (like regional language advertising).

Recently, Microsoft launched it’s digital/mobile advertising platform and mGinger (which earlier raised $2mn from DFJ) launched regional language advertising.

What’s your take on mobile advertising? Is it sustainable enough to monetize the long tail/BoP users?

Must Read: Permission Marketing and Mobile Advertising in India

Technorati tags: mkhoj, kpcb

Tags: Indian Startups, mkhoj, mobile ad network

| More

Related Articles
Author

Prashant

this is a tricky & very Forward looking investment . Tricky in a good sense . this area is promising but one of the toughest market to crack.

few points about the problem they are addressing "Providing Advertising on Mobile " there are only two known way of showing Ad on Mobile . PUSH on SMS like mGinger where you get a advertisement message as sms . its somewhat intrusive but that another story . provider of these PUSH sms are promoting it by various tactics like Pyramid Money Distribution of mGinger or Advertisement subsidized Free Messaging of 160by2,smsgupshup,.

i am not sure how these companies will go about regional language advertisements when most of the HANDSETS are not unicode complaint and can not render devnagri script .

other way to show advertisement is showing text link or banner along side mobile content in browser . this is where the money is. Sequoia funded company Admob is doing some great work in this in Europe and US to some extent in Asia also . they server around 2 billion Ad per month [ http://www.admob.com/s/home/live]

now the problem with mobile web advertisement is that

#1 there should be a Lot of people hitting these sites from the handset . which is clearly not the case [at least as of now ] . given prohibitive device & GPRS cost and Walled garden nature of mobile web i am not sure how this is going to change in near future .

#2 whenever Mobile web advertisemnt market begin to pick up someone or other from the Telco or Publisher comes to spoil the party . they do it by "on the fly" Trans coding and content reformatting which essentially strip the web page of any advertisement . first Google Did it [http://tinyurl.com/2szuk9] and now Vodafone UK is doing the same [http://tinyurl.com/5xekh8] .

this will be interesting to see how mKhoj Team resolve these issues . ofcourse $7.1 Mn will be of great help here . good move by KPCB